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What people don't seem to realize is that an increase of popularity of Linux will lead to a tragedy of the commons situation. Desktop Linux currently is mature

What people don't seem to realize is that an increase of popularity of Linux will lead to a tragedy of the commons situation. Desktop Linux currently is mature enough to be usable for most everyday tasks, but has a small enough market share to generally not fall prey to adware, spyware, malware, telemetry, backdoors, EEE type strategies, closed source blobs creeping into the ecosystem and so forth. As its market share increases, the more viable a target it becomes for such things.

tmikaeld 6y ago
Desktop Linux in general seem to have a very large amount of probable vulnerabilities, but it also has a very large community of companies that sponsor work and rely on it for servers. Would be interesting to see how quickly an open back-door is fixed after it's discovered. Is the maintainer available? If not, can the package be replaced? Will it be vulnerable for months, years? So many uncertainties make me not want to rely on Desktop Linux for sensitive work.
- em-bee 6y ago
  from my past experience, faster than on windows or mac. the application maintainers need not be available. the distribution maintainers can step in and apply fixes to the versions they distribute. if a 3rd party windows application has a security issue, good luck getting any fixes.
AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago
> closed source blobs creeping into the ecosystem and so forth Modern Linux is heavily reliant on closed source firmware blobs already.
- fsflover 6y ago
  Only if you have chosen the wrong hardware. See Purism.
  - ac29 6y ago
    That's only partially true though - for example, I don't believe there are any 802.11ac (or ax) WiFi adapters that don't require binary blobs. Purism punts on that, and just ships an old 802.11n adapter.
    - fsflover 6y ago
      You are right. But the original claim was "heavily reliant on closed source firmware blobs", which is not really true.

tmikaeld 6y ago

Desktop Linux in general seem to have a very large amount of probable vulnerabilities, but it also has a very large community of companies that sponsor work and rely on it for servers. Would be interesting to see how quickly an open back-door is fixed after it's discovered. Is the maintainer available? If not, can the package be replaced? Will it be vulnerable for months, years? So many uncertainties make me not want to rely on Desktop Linux for sensitive work.

em-bee 6y ago
from my past experience, faster than on windows or mac. the application maintainers need not be available. the distribution maintainers can step in and apply fixes to the versions they distribute. if a 3rd party windows application has a security issue, good luck getting any fixes.

AnIdiotOnTheNet 6y ago

> closed source blobs creeping into the ecosystem and so forth Modern Linux is heavily reliant on closed source firmware blobs already.

fsflover 6y ago
Only if you have chosen the wrong hardware. See Purism.
- ac29 6y ago
  That's only partially true though - for example, I don't believe there are any 802.11ac (or ax) WiFi adapters that don't require binary blobs. Purism punts on that, and just ships an old 802.11n adapter.
  - fsflover 6y ago
    You are right. But the original claim was "heavily reliant on closed source firmware blobs", which is not really true.