Exactly. It’s Yet Another Privilege Escalation Vulnerability. Unless you’re dealing with a multiuser machine, the attacker first needs to use some other vuln to get into an unprivileged account. Without that additional vulnerability, this exploit is useless.
We don’t talk about 1997. It might hear. 😱
As a long-time Gentoo user, I can tell you that it’s perfectlly capable of producing both a useful gaming rig and a useful server, provided you have some idea of what you want to end up with.
Proprietary nvidia drivers should be straightforward enough: emerge nvidia-drivers and blacklist the nouveau module (or compile a custom kernel that doesn’t contain it). You’ll probably want to read what the Gentoo wiki has to say about Steam.
Good luck.
Well, it often feels like every “Linux security issue” flagged in the tech press is a privilege escalation, but I admit that I haven’t sat down and done the math.