I've worked from home for many years and currently have 2 main computers--my desktop and my laptop. I've tried to keep any kind of spyware off of my laptop, but my company uses a number of Google and other products that most likely have spyware in some form or other and so I must have them on my desktop in order to do my work.
Now my company is wanting to put me on the road to visit clients and I will need a computer with me. I don't want to take 2 computers so I'm working on a way to isolate professionally necessary but personally unwanted programs. It looks like something like virtualbox (if it can be trusted) would work. I boot as I normally do and run all the suspicious software in separate environments. So, my questions are:
1. Is that overkill? Would a simple sandbox chroot accomplish the same thing? Even if so, I can see some other advantages to something like virtualbox, such as testing things on other Linux distributions or obtrusive things I'd kind of like to use like Steam, so I'm leaning that way.
2. Everything I've found about how to use virtualbox assumes you have systemd. Can anyone point me to instructions on getting it working on Obarun? That's why I'm posting this here instead of some other forum.
3. Any other advice from those who value privacy?
You might be able to use virt-manager& libvirt instead, it can use qemu which seems to be more linux non-systemd friendly, there is even provided a libvirtd-66serv servicefile in the observice repo.

I value privacy also, I even have installed skulls coreboot bios& soft disabled the ME state, but I haven't been forced by my work to explore all the methods to secure my system.

I'll be watching to see others input of what methods others here might use.
Also, you may use a docker, simple to build, run, stop, destroy and the application run in a safer sandbox. Even from a docker you can launch a GUI application.
Combined with portainer its also simple to manage multiple container.
Obviously, if you need to run a MS system, the idea is not good for you.
Thanks! That gives me some things to research as this is all new to me. I don't need any MS stuff--even one of my bosses runs Linux (Arch). But they use a lot of Google stuff.

Edit: Referring to docker and portainer: After briefly looking at them, are you recommending non-FOSS for privacy? I'm confused.

Edit2: Oops, I see, portainer has a community version.
5 days later
Speaking of docker, @ eric, im curious were you able to run rootless docker on your system, if so, how?

Powered by Obarun