What If All the World Ran Linux? | Hacker News Reader

What If All the World Ran Linux?

pcworld.com

12 pointsMithrandir9 comments

5. Better Software

This is a highly dubious claim. First off the commercial software industry would just migrate to Linux, just like it does any high volume platform it can make money off of.

Secondly, and this opinion might not be popular but... I for one have yet to be convinced that open source software is "better" quality wise by definition. Yes much of it is as good as commercial products, much of it isn't. I still feel that a controlled, well selected development team working in a proper environment that encourages good communication will be more productive than a loosely tied group effort. The latter often suffers from a lack of clear goals and direction, sadly. Not that it CAN'T be done, but I'm not yet convinced it's a given that open source = better quality by default. Either side of the coin can produce quality, and crap. :)

Just my 2c.

Offhand, I’d have to say the amount of bad/good software is similar to what exists commercially. The difference is that a lot of commercial software is either enterprise and hidden, or so obscure nobody cares.

“Better” often refers to better designed, however, and a lot of OSS projects are actively hostile to any one creative vision that would shape the interface.

An interesting article, but I have to disagree with his conclusions about the effect on malware.

I'd say that mainstream Linux adoption would likely be dominated by 1 or 2 major distros, like Ubuntu. Any potential attack vector could be targeted at that distro's package management system, for instance, and be assured of some impact.

In addition, many distros share a common underlying base system (like Debian) - any child distros of a vulnerable system would also presumably share the same vulnerabilities.

I also disagree on points 1 and 2 but for different reasons. We're still going to need antivirus as long as less computer literate people download and run random executables. Gaining root or administrator privileges isn't necessary for the common tasks that malware does such as spending spam or getting the user's usernames/passwords/credit card details.

Also, despite its stronger security model, all it takes is one script that runs as root to have the wrong permissions set, or to read/execute other executables which have wrong permissions and you've got root. I'm not sure if the common packages on standard Linux desktop machines are configured correctly out of the box (I'd hope that they are), but this is worryingly common in corporate/enterprise environments. There are also bugs in other packages (including the kernel) which can be used for privilege escalation through buffer overflows, etc (although these tend to be patched fairly quickly)

s/his/her/

This article makes the specious assumption that if all the world ran Linux, free software would reign. Currently, the dominant Linux culture is a self-selected group of FLOSS fanatics. If all the world ran Linux, those people would be just as much a minority of Linux users as Linux users are of the total PC-using populace.

It isn't as though people lack options for free software on today's popular operating systems — they just generally choose to use commercial software.

The argument that bothers me is "Better Software". Sure, the leading software platform in the world will definitely have better software, since there'd be more developers working on it. Feels like begging the question to me.

You might as well replace "Linux" with "Web Apps" and get a similar picture. I'd argue we're closer to this world than an all-Linux one.

I am a big Linux and Open-source fan, but the author is lying to himself. His claims have absolutely no proof.

Espacially point 1 is a joke. How many Linux users habe anti-virus software?

Didn't read the article yet, but I think the world would be full of people who actually understood computers (or enough about Linux to function with it) and a much much geekier life. That would be awesome. reads article.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com