Hi everybody. Just your friendly neighborhood Linux nerd. Use Linux, it's open source.
A step away.
> Nothing by itself.
Not so.
> Solving these problems is a tad more difficult than merely using Linux.
True. But it's swallowing the red pill, just something you have to swallow to know how deep the rabbit hole goes.
"Not so." Prove it. Linux still shows your communications on plaintext online by default. They have zero days in popular apps and kernel for Linux. They have attacks below firmware if you get clever with OS security. So, no, using Linux by itself doesn't change anything for bulk collection as proven by the Snowden leaks. It can be an improvement over Windows for targeted collection but will still be hit in default state. And most people hearing "Use Linux" aren't qualified to get it anywhere near bulletproof. So, they'll be easy targets.
Using any standard, mainstream system when nation-states are after you equals much higher chance of getting your box owned. It's just economics: they focus on attacks w/ highest ROI. Windows, Mac, and Linux kernels are highest ROI for desktop. People on an Amiga are probably less likely to get hacked by automated system despite inferior security just because of its obscurity and attackers' focus. It's why my old trick of BSD or UNIX on non-popular ISA's (eg Alpha) stopped so many attacks despite their apparent sophistication.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2014/05/friday_squid_...
Might explained why a few closed source products achieved high assurance security (B3/A1/EAL6/EAL7) that survived years of NSA pentesting while FOSS... see Snowden leaks. You can get those freedoms with proprietary models via contracts, esp with non-profits. Most just are about money though. Likewise, FOSS communities rarely deliver high-quality, maintained software and never deliver highly assured software.
So all this philosophical crap serves nobody if we're talking about making software trustworthy. For that, we need capable people building it while utilizing every security-enhancing method we know, trustworthy people reviewing it whether closed or open, ability to know you possess what was reviewed in that configuration, and continual maintenance esp of bugfixes. That's the baseline we need to push whether FOSS or a proprietary version of open-source.
The only method of securing your data is to make sure it never leaves your computer without your consent and using Linux is one of many possible things you can do to ensure that. Sure, if you're running Skype, Chrome, Steam, etc. on your Linux laptop then the benefit is pretty marginal but still technically better than if it was on Windows.