As I've mentioned before, I started out with SELinux turned on on my laptop because it's essentially a stock Fedora install and that's how Fedora defaults, and using SELinux felt virtuous. Last year I reached the end of my patience with running SELinux in enforcing mode, where it actually denies access to things; instead I switched it to permissive, where it just whines about things that it would have forbidden and then a whole complicated pile of software springs into action to tell you about these audit failures with notifications, popup dialogs and so on.

Today I gave up on that. My laptop now has SELinux disabled entirely (as my desktop machines have for years). The cause is simple: too many SELinux violations kept happening and especially too many new and different ones kept coming up. I am only willing to play whack a mole on notification alerts for so long before I stop caring entirely, and I reached that point today. The simplest and most easily reversed way to stop getting notifications about SELinux violations is to set the SELinux policy to disabled in /etc/selinux/config, so that's what I did.

It's possible that some of the problem is due to just upgrading to Fedora 22 with yum instead of, say, fedup, and perhaps it could be patched up somewhat with 'restorecon -R /'. Perhaps a wholesale reinstall would reduce it even more (at the cost of putting me through a wholesale reinstall and then figuring out how to set up my environment and my account and keys and wifi access and VPNs and so on all over again). Certainly I assume that SELinux has to work for some people on Fedora. But I no longer care. I am done with being quixotically virtuous and suffering for it.

(I originally put a rant about Fedora and SELinux here, but after thinking about it I took it out again. It's nothing I haven't said before and I can't be sure that my SELinux problems would still be there if I did absolutely everything the officially approved Fedora way. Since I'm never going to stop eg doing Fedora version updates with yum, well, that case will never apply to me.)