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I have no reasonable basis to believe your "Linux is easier to pwn" argument. Saying that all those other non-techy big things "choose Windows" is a really str

by jrm4 3y ago

I have no reasonable basis to believe your "Linux is easier to pwn" argument. Saying that all those other non-techy big things "choose Windows" is a really stretchy definition of "choose." It's been long enough, we know the story, robber baron Bill Gates was able to jump ahead and cement Windows mindshare. It is what it is. Again, I don't get what you're relying on when you say "desktop linux is the worst?" Sure, windows claims to be better, etc. But, and here's the important part, they've ALWAYS been cagey. You just can't ever REALLY know. Now on the Linux side, sure -- there are lots of visible issues. That's good, because they are visible. No one knows "all the code," and more importantly, no one can easily predict what Windows (and perhaps Apple) will do tomorrow to screw up the desktop, but we know they have the capacity to. No thanks, I'll trust the thing that doesn't come with such possible arbitrary baggage.

hollerith 3y ago
>robber baron Bill Gates was able to jump ahead and cement Windows mindshare. I agree and that is one of the thing I meant by my "strong economic incentives that keeps an OS or other piece of infrastructure dominant for decades". But Linux retains its niche in internet services the same way! Linux became dominant in internet services in the 1990s when the only alternative was Windows (and unlike today, in the 1990s Windows was no more secure than Linux). Apple wasn't even trying to compete in this market (or in the "enterprise" market that Microsoft has dominated since the 1990s): there a nice transcript about an internal meeting at Apple where Jobs tells some engineer that Apple sells its products to consumers and if he want to learn how to sell to IT departments, he should go work for HP or something. The internet-services industry ended up using Linux on its server farms basically because in the 1990s, Microsoft didn't sufficiently appreciate the advantages of open-source licensing, so they ended up disqualifying themselves in the eyes of the Dot Coms. Also, this conversation is about desktop Linux. What part of a typical Linux desktop (such as my Fedora Workstation install that I'm using to write these words) do you think runs on Google's servers? My guess is that it is just the kernel and a few libraries like libc. How dominant Linux is on servers at Google and Facebook has no bearing on the security qualities or lack thereof of all the other code (Wayland, Gnome, GTK, graphics drivers, media players, codecs, font and typography libraries) running on a typical Linux desktop.

by jrm4 3y ago

hollerith 3y ago

>robber baron Bill Gates was able to jump ahead and cement Windows mindshare. I agree and that is one of the thing I meant by my "strong economic incentives that keeps an OS or other piece of infrastructure dominant for decades". But Linux retains its niche in internet services the same way! Linux became dominant in internet services in the 1990s when the only alternative was Windows (and unlike today, in the 1990s Windows was no more secure than Linux). Apple wasn't even trying to compete in this market (or in the "enterprise" market that Microsoft has dominated since the 1990s): there a nice transcript about an internal meeting at Apple where Jobs tells some engineer that Apple sells its products to consumers and if he want to learn how to sell to IT departments, he should go work for HP or something. The internet-services industry ended up using Linux on its server farms basically because in the 1990s, Microsoft didn't sufficiently appreciate the advantages of open-source licensing, so they ended up disqualifying themselves in the eyes of the Dot Coms. Also, this conversation is about desktop Linux. What part of a typical Linux desktop (such as my Fedora Workstation install that I'm using to write these words) do you think runs on Google's servers? My guess is that it is just the kernel and a few libraries like libc. How dominant Linux is on servers at Google and Facebook has no bearing on the security qualities or lack thereof of all the other code (Wayland, Gnome, GTK, graphics drivers, media players, codecs, font and typography libraries) running on a typical Linux desktop.