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Comment by Razengan | Hacker News Reader

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Razengan·

How can you compare?

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Can know for sure vs nobody knows. The comparison is clearly in favor of Linux.

> The comparison is clearly in favor of Linux.

Magnitudes of more people use Windows and macOS than Linux* and they have yet to fail catastrophically.

* not counting servers and embedded

There are far more devices running Linux in the world than Windows & macOS combined. That would seem to be a much more useful comparison than how many people own those devices.

Parent post was updated to say "not counting servers and embedded", but dismissing smartphones -- literally the most popular type of personal computing device in the world -- this way seems to completely invalidate the point.

I dunno, why do you say that?

The parent thread was about possible backdoors; more devices running a piece of software = more surface area for any possible backdoor in that software.

The windows source code is actually readable for very large organizations and governments.

But not the White hat hacking world.

But can they build it and run it? Or do they have to trust the code is current and matches the binaries?

I would belive so. Probably possible to compile and debug but not distribute. There is little information about it. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/

> Can know for sure

can know what -- that there isn't a backdoor? I can look at Linux source all day and not find the answer to that.

We, as a community, can.

One dedicated person, can.

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