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No they're not. And if you're going to assert something (especially something that absurd) you should at least justify it with an argument. I'm sure you're thi
by usrn 4y ago
No they're not. And if you're going to assert something (especially something that absurd) you should at least justify it with an argument.
I'm sure you're thinking something along the lines of "Android has an SELinux sandbox that prompts for permissions." You can run this on normal desktop Linux too though (I forget the command, it's a python script in the SELinux tools (or so) repo.) No one bothers because the distro repos are relatively free of malware and installing non-free software requires a small amount of understanding. This is, of course, considered "bad UX" for non-free software but that is in practice where most of the malware comes from on other OSes. (On Linux most f it comes from sloppy language specific package managers with a free-for-all mentality like node.js or PyPi but no amount of OS design can fix stupid devs without making their work impossible.)
- kaba0 4y agoSELinux is not a sandbox, and is just one part of the picture. Android also runs every app under a different user — and that is where SELinux can properly uphold its security barriers. Most linux distros even if they have SELinux enabled (e.g. Fedora) will run every user process under your user and UNIX’s default permissions are pretty much useless. So it is only security improvement for services. You running npm install can potentially delete everything in your home directory, but a buggy application (even if opensource and made with good intention) can be exploited by evil data just as well. Just because your, say, PDF reader is open source it can be used to exploit your computer with an evil pdf file. So yes, linux desktops are orders of magnitude less safe than either Android or ios.