How do BSD and Linux compare on the defensive in 2023? Has the larger community finally spent enough eyeballs to catch up with the better foundation?
Not to mention the developer who did that seems like an absolute piece of work.
> The Macys' attempts to force their tenants out included sawing through floor support joists to make the building unfit for human habitation, sawing holes directly through the floors of tenants' apartments, and forging extremely threatening emails appearing to be from the tenants themselves. The couple fled to Italy to avoid prosecution but were eventually extradited back to the US—where they pled guilty to a reduced set of felonies and served four years and four months each.
Like I said, I'm not an infosec guy, all I can refer to is a somewhat informed gut feeling. A comparatively small audience which is convinced that it belongs to the "good" group is inherently vulnerable, the article just made some of those dynamics visible.
FreeBSD doesn't have OVAL data, and invented their own crappy XML format and disclose vulnerabilities via mailing lists (without any automateable parseable format, because it's emails). [1]
OpenBSD's erratas are maintained as patch files that people would have to merge in themselves. Literally [2]
So yeah, I'd argue to use Arch over BSD anytime. They patch vulnerabilities upstream first, don't diverge in their packages from upstream when it comes to backports, and patch critical vulnerabilities within less than 24 hours on average, if they are patchable. [3] and [4]
Also, don't use Debian or Ubuntu. Security-wise they are a nightmare due to soooooo many wrongly labelled issues, where they put in "too diverged from upstream" and dozens of other freetext-labels as a reason to not fix critical RCEs. Impossible to maintain security-wise.
[1] https://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories/
[2] https://www.openbsd.org/errata72.html
For upgrades, you use pkg_add -u for your installed packages and sysupgrade between releases for the base.
https://vez.mrsk.me/freebsd-defaults.html
(Discussion on HN from 6 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32506675)
BSD maintainers are fast fixing known exploits but has the drawback of older tech like X11. Wayland works on FreeBSD but still doesn't work with KDE on it.
Games are also very hit or miss.
IDK it's just felt very half baked. And this was with Gnome which my understanding should have very decent wayland support?
Which GPU do you have? Wayland on nvidia is definitely more buggy than wayland on AMD and Intel, so if you run nvidia that could definitely be a factor.
It sucks that nvidia is more buggy in general on linux because they're currently the only realistic* option for working with a bunch of ML stuff.
* Yes ROCM is gaining support, but it's still trailing behind CUDA unfortunately and you can't beat the 4090/3090 for ML in the consumer range right now.
The only thing concession I need to make is running Slack in a browser tab instead of the app, because the app comes with an older version of Electron.
The fact you make it run within a browser don't mean you can't run it in a separate window.
The only good point I can think of is having a separate icon for the app in an alt+tab situation. But in my case I use the activities view on Gnome and usually view and recognize the window content. Also epiphany browser allows me to create "apps" with their own icon. Sadly not all of them work due to user agent nazism.
I'm talking about how electron apps prevent you from a wider range of window resizing
And I would say missing one feature I am unlikely to use is a small price to pay for more control of my privacy, advertising, telemetry, hardware and OS access.
Not everyone considers that a drawback.
But we were talking about security and there's no denying that X11's architecture has inherent security risks. You can cover this in other ways but security wise I do consider it a drawback.
However in most other ways I do prefer X over Wayland too.
The thing that keeps me off the Wayland train is that they are not intending to support X's remote features, which I use quite heavily. I'm unaware of any other way to do simultaneous independent remote DE logins.
It's not very performant because it was designed for local networks and relies on too many round-trips. NX fixes that but it's too fiddly.
Also you really need to trust your remote box because it'll be able to see and control all your screens. It can do this even without popping up any user visible windows so be careful. For this reason I don't blanket enable it, I just use the -Y parameter only when I need it.
But yes I'd love to see something that continues on this path and brings it into the 21st century.
Not sure what your point is though, a default install of Linux is far better than a default install of windows.