Holy cow, didn’t realize just how bad Microsoft is getting. That behavior is unjustifiable especially considering this is just for wallpapers.

I’m on the bandwagon of not hosting it myself. It really breaks down to a level of commitment & surface area issue for me.

Commitment: I know my server OS isn’t setup as well as it could be for mission critical software/uptime. I’m a hobbiest with limited time to spend on this hobby and I can’t spend 100hrs getting it all right.

Surface Area: I host a bunch of non mission critical services on one server and if I was hosting a password manager it would also be on that server. So I have a very large attack surface area and a weakness in one of those could result in all my passwords & more stored in the manager being exposed.

So I don’t trust my own OS to be fully secure and I don’t trust the other services and my configurations of them to be secure either. Given that any compromise of my password manager would be devastating. I let someone else host it.

I’ve seen that in the occassional cases when password managers have been compromised, the attacker only ends up with non encrypted user data & encrypted passwords. The encrypted passwords are practically unbreakable. The services also hire professionals who host and work in hosting for a living. And usually have better data siloing than I can afford.

All that to say I use bitwarden. It is an open source system which has plenty of security built into the model so even if compromised I don’t think my passwords are at risk. And I believe they are more well equipped to ensure that data is being managed well.

OpenSUSE tumbleweed is a good compromise IMO. it is also a rolling release distro with built in snapshotting. So if anything does go wrong it takes ~5 mins to roll back to the last good snapshot. You can set the same thing up on arch but it isn’t ootb and YAST is a great management tool as well.