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Most popular Linux distros are in many ways more vulnerable than Windows. Microsoft employs actual security engineers for Windows. To give one example, X11 is s
by est31 5y ago
Most popular Linux distros are in many ways more vulnerable than Windows. Microsoft employs actual security engineers for Windows. To give one example, X11 is still in wide use.
The secure Linux distros are all of the locked down kind, like Chrome OS and Android.
The reason why we aren't seeing widespread desktop Linux malware campaigns is because almost nobody uses desktop Linux. The year of the Linux desktop, whenever it will be, will be followed by the year of the Linux desktop malware.
I love open source and free software, but it's not inherently more secure.
- iratewizard 5y agoLinux is still under 2% of the market share for anyone wondering.
- GekkePrutser 5y agoMarket share for desktops of course ;)
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ploxiln 5y agoYou might be surprised to find that Windows has a similar problem to X11 - any GUI window can send messages to any other GUI window, and on consumer versions of windows you can't use multiple simultaneous user sessions to separate different applications. https://invisiblethingslab.com/resources/2014/A%20crack%20on%20the%20glass.pdf https://invisiblethingslab.com/resources/2014/A%20crack%20on... It's true that windows has way more mitigation technologies, and X11 is more laissez-faire. But if you don't run untrusted or crappy software, linux can be pretty damn good. You just don't really know how crappy all the components of windows really are, or which mitigations are really useful or really working correctly, and in software with that much complexity there's always some stuff that isn't really working and nobody notices. In linux, if you really care, you can trim down to a very minimal curated setup, and that's really the only way to know what's really going on in your computer.