I mean, I’ve been hearing it for 15 years, we can’t be wrong for that long, right? Which means that next year it’s 100%!
Would it even be a good thing if Linux became super main stream? Maybe we should be careful what we wish for.
How would it be bad? More hardware support, more users not feeding data to corporations, more software support and so on.
It’s really sad that this needs to be said. I 100% agree with the sentiment. The reason I use Linux is because most of my work requires Linux, but I resisted it for a really long time because communities like these are just incredibly toxic and insufferable. Sometimes looking at this community makes me want to rage-boot Windows and become a C# dev all over again.
In this case I actually mainly meant MacOS, which has a relatively big market share. Though for me personally it’s Linux, it applies to all other operating systems, with MacOS being the one large enough that people who use windows can’t ignore it. I’m not a fan of these “here’s what you need to know” titles because it doesn’t add anything, the title would be functionally the same without it. I was making fun of this by saying that I don’t need to know this and thus showing that (this part of) the title is only included to get more clicks
Same for people using windows 7
Regardless of us using Linux on our home computers, most businesses and services use Windows machines. Your information is likely still stored on Windows machines elsewhere if you interact with the world at all.
With that in mind, it’s worth being aware of Windows security problems when they come up.
What would we do when these happen? What could we do in the moment to change anything?
Join an eventual class action?
If you think being on Linux makes you immune for attacks, I have bad news for you.
there are much less vulrenabilities on Linux. No system is totally unpenetrable, but having 2-5 vulrebabilities is always better than having 30-40
I’ve got a link for you to click, Mr super secure OS user. I promise your OS will protect you.
Here I have a cool program to install. Just pipe this link into bash really quick…
you are just exploiting my words. I never said Linux will protect me whatever happens. But it will have a better protection inherently, than any windows
Realistically the difference is in how Linux mitigates the common vectors for attack that Windows doesn’t. Most malware targeting individual workstations gets in by either supply chain attack, vulnerable web renderer or by tricking the user into installing it.
Centralized repositories with centralized build tooling limits opportunities for supply chain attacks, plus helps prevent users from accidentally downloading a Trojan when trying to grab other software. Containerizing web applications helps limit browser exploits, and less “features” phoning home means a default incoming-deny firewall policy will largely prevent most vulnerabilities from being remotely serious.
So for an individual workstation, Linux is significantly safer from viruses. In the enterprise it’s a completely different story where the threat environment does require defense in depth regardless of your choices of vendors
It probably makes you a less likely target though. I suppose that bots scan for known Widows vulnerabilities simply because that platform has a much higher market share among desktop operating systems. Besides, Linux distros offer a unified way to update all your software. On Windows, third-party software is often installed and maintained manually.
The way I have always liked to put it specifically is that Linux is not inherently more secure than windows. However Linux is inherently easier to secure than Windows. Namespaces, apparmor, seccomp-bpf, and a very fine grain limited vs super user permission system. Just to name a few top level things.
The tools are all there on basically any system, very well documented, relatively easy to use. And once you set them up they will not randomly change things on you. I say this as a system administrator having to deal with Windows constantly where Microsoft decides that they are smarter than you and fuck your group policy edits because we put out this update and we think this option is better so we’re going to revert like half the shit you did. Over half my fucking job and security is just checking what did Microsoft fuck up about my security set up with this update, and trying to rotate through security vendor 2094726 to fill in the absolute basic security processes that windows doesn’t provide
