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Comment by Phurist | Hacker News Reader

Or you know... just use Linux

There's nothing magical about the Linux security architecture, when it comes to malware, aside from abysmal Linux market share. If it were popular it would be targeted.

That's not to say there's no value. It's a case of security by obscurity, at best. The Unix security model is much more simplistic than Windows NT. Everybody disables SELinux so there's no meaningful capabilities functionality.

Assuming you actually do run malware, all your user account's data on a Linux machine ends up being just as vulnerable to exfil or ransom as if you're running Windows as a limited user.

"Everybody disables SELinux"

That implies you are probably using a RH jobbie. With no working whatsover, I assert that many more Linux desktops will be rocking apparmor or no kernel security module.

Oh and no I don't disable SELinux, except as a quick check to see if that is what is causing issues. Obviously I'm not everyone, but I am someone.

I haven't used desktop Linux in a number of years, but back when I did I'd see disabling SELinux was a common recommendation. I hope things are getting better.

On the Linux application hosting front the majority of vendor-supported garbage I have the displeasure of supporting that runs outside of Docker disables SELinux as a matter of course.

I haven't daily driven anything but Linux for 15 years or more. I remember when Xorg was the new kid and XFree86 could destroy your CRT (or so "they" said - I never managed it!) Mind you I also remember #make config taking about 20 minutes.

Advice advocating disabling selinux is very similar to SFC /SCANNOW or "turn off your anti virus". As soon as you see advice like that you do have to wonder at the motive.

A quick broad-brush approach to troubleshooting is fine and could be considered the first stage before a binary search is used to get to the real problem. So you make things safe first and then you switch off something like selinux. Does that work? If yes, then you switch it back on and then do your search within selinux and perhaps bother with reading logs.

You obviously have to support a lot of cough enterprise ... RH based stuff or perhaps Oracle's sufferings.

If you can, call someone's bluff: Insist on a standard. PCI DSS is involved as soon as a payment card is involved - that will soon sort things out. In the UK, we have Cyber Essentials and the plus form. Non UK Europe also has similar standards. The US will have Freedom versions of any standards and the rest of the world will have theirs.

Go in with standards if you can. As soon as you permanently switch off a security mechanism you have failed (yourself and your customer).

Good luck mate.

On Linux one typically runs third-party (not coming from official repositories) software in a sandbox which is a great pain (good luck sandboxing an Electron app) but at least possible. Unless you own exploits to bypass kernel restrictions you cannot do much.

I've got a snap installed, I think it's for the google command line tools. It will quite often at random times pop up a window in KDE asking for the admin password, and there is nothing in that window that tells me what or why the admin password is needed.

Decided it was a risk to just be typing the admin password whenever a random popup asked me to, so disabled all snap automatic updates.

Right tool for the job. Linux for deploying stuff to, Linux or mac for working on the stuff you’ll deploy. Windows for games and everyday use. They’re all superior in their category and it’s too obvious to spend time arguing about.

You don't need Windows for games since ages. Steam games run on Linux.

Not really if you ever tried. Barely playing music, games obviously don’t work if you ever tried playing games. (hint, game x not beeing terrible doesen’t mean ”it works”). like I said at the start this is fairly obvious.

I play AAA games on steam deck running stock steam OS. It's rock solid. Look at the sales of steam deck alone, it's quite successful

You can game on Linux for many years now. Windows is mostly mandatory if you play multiplayer games with anticheat

yea pong working on linux doesen’t equal to gaming working on linux. Most games won’t start or play worse.

ive been playing elden ring fantastically on the steam deck. its the game of the year from a couple years back

You have been living under a rock. Wine and proton are significantly faster than native windows. With valve's partnership with Archlinux last year, it's going to get even better

You’re either trolling or simply unaware but Steam and Proton allows you to run quite a bit of the Steam library on Linux with good performance.

Windows is bad for everyday use because it sends all your data to Microsoft, you need to get a cloud account and can get banned from your system at any moment, it can install changes at any time etc. So basically you get humiliated every time you use your computer.

Windows is good for work though because if it starts updating during the work day, or breaks, you can do nothing and still get paid. And if it leaks your company data, it is not your problem also.

There are many reasons someone might have to use Windows. I have a Windows box because a number of games I play don’t support Linux, even with WINE and Proton.

I found that ProtonDB is quite helpful in figuring out how many games will or won’t run well: https://www.protondb.com/

You can even log in with Steam and get the summary for your exact library, for anyone curious.

It’s fine for a casual single player game. I’ve played rimworld on Linux mint. But league? Fortnite? Cod? Battlefield?

I am very aware of which games don't work with Proton, which is why I know I need a windows machine.

Linux ransomware does not require root.

Make sure to never do

  curl example.com/easyscript.sh | sudo bash

> Or you know... just use Linux

...where namespaces provide excellent technology for hiding malware making linux one of the best platforms to turn into a evil host.

Do they? Processes inside a namespace still are visible from the top level namespace.

Every couple of years I give daily driving Linux a try. I still find that old joke about "Linux is only free if your time is worth nothing" to be quite apt.

I switched to Ubuntu "skinned" with Omakub a few months ago. Never looked back. Work with Windows on my work machine and use my *nix box as my daily dev driver and machine for surfing the net, doing emails and documents. I actually use it for nearly everything except vector graphics/dtp & images, as I am still too used to the affinity suite.

Will try out Omarchy just for the fun of it - not that I expect it to become my daily driver.

But - depending on your needs - I think Linux can be on par (for me it is way better, longer battery life, better configuration, better tools, smoother workflows, but YMMV).

Please don't use that horrible script. It makes no sense to install such bloatware on top of an already bloated distro, which adds unnecessary attack surface. I would recommend fedora or arch, both are perfect for beginners with minimal bloat

Do you mind elaborating a bit on what went wrong? Like, were you installing on a recent MacBook, or something else not well supported? In my experience, installing and running a popular distro is absolute cake. Easier than Windows, even, since you aren’t forced to create cloud accounts and answer a million privacy questions; you basically install then boot right into your new desktop.

Used it on various devices. A Dell laptop (with power switching between dedicated and iGPU, what a nightmare that was for Linux display drivers), a desktop I built myself, a Raspberry Pi running RPi OS.

I find most things fine in Linux and I'm fairly comfortable with the terminal. However it's the 10% or so of things that are very cumbersome in Linux but instant in Windows/Mac that drive me away.

Example: There is no Google Drive client for Linux. Spend an hour dorking around in rclone and get it set up and working with bidirectional sync. The token still expires weekly and needs to be renewed. Yeah, I get a potential solution is "don't use Google Drive" but the little projects to get my current workflow functioning on Linux, or change my workflow to fit Linux's constraints, end up adding up into a bunch of wasted time.

>There is no Google Drive client for Linux

What? Google accounts have been a thing in Gnome for years. You have Google Drive access right in Nautilus.

Not for ARM.

If you use a distro built on GNOME, ARM or not does not matter

Almost all distros have an ARM version. KDE can also handle online services such as google drive. There are also a couple of other projects to deal with it if you don't like KDE or Gnome. What you claim is trivially untrue.

Have you tried just using it in browser?

The point is that Linux is not worse it is just different. What you do on Windows or iOS will not be the same as on Linux. How you adapt and if you want to is the point.

I am horribly ineffective on Windows even if I am forced to use it. The only reason for me to use it is to play multiplayer games though, and it is the default install on new laptops before installing Linux. So Windows sucks because it does not have what I need, and I see no reasons to change my ways to Windows.

But if this is your first time using Windows or Mac, you will also need time to get used to it. I've tried using a Mac, and so far I'm not used to it. :)

Every few years someone forces me to use Windows and I find that my data is apparently worth nothing since it being one giant anti-pattern wastes my time.

I agree, I switched to Mac last fall with the incessant Windows 10 popups that my CPU is not supported and I can't upgrade to Windows 11, so buy a new PC chump or you'll be EOL! Okay, I bought a new PC Mr. Nadella, it just doesn't run Windows.

That ended up being the last straw in a long line of complaints with data privacy and things being forced on me in Windows. Somehow that stupid Bing toolbar would constantly re-enable itself and re-appear on my desktop after every update despite being disabled everywhere I could find a setting for...

I wasn't very happy with Apple's bizarre UI or out of date libraries.

The easiest way to make an OS with ideal support on one platform is to only support Apple's hardware instead of the PC cosmos, so I will be interested if Asahi getting the relatively little resources it needs will gradually make it the least waste of time choice to use Linux on Apple hardware.

I don't find it to be that way at all. I've used Debian as my daily driver for almost 10 years and I spend maybe... 30 minutes per year dealing with setup and configuration and stuff?

Much less than I needed to back when I mainly used Windows.

Sure, there's a learning curve. But Windows has a learning curve too, you just already climbed that hill.

Judging from the rest of the thread, they were referring to setup and configuration. For the most part, I consider this to be one of the strengths of Linux.

On the other hand, the operating system is the means rather than the end to most people. If a person is transitioning from Windows to Linux, they will probably have a substantial number of new programs to learn in the process. That is going to factor into most people's impressions of the operating system as a whole.

I don't know what your use case is, so what I'm about to say may not be relevant.

When you're making the transition from one operating system to another, there is going to be an investment of time. It doesn't matter whether you are moving from Windows to Linux or from Linux to Windows. When it comes to getting things done, each operating system is going to have its own strengths and weaknesses. Our attention is going to be drawn towards the weaknesses of what we are trying out because that is what we are going to spend the most time addressing. Our attention is going to drift away from the weaknesses of what we are familiar with since we have long since learned to circumvent or ignore them.

What I am suggesting is that I would spend as much time learning how to daily drive Windows as you would learning how to daily drive Linux. Unfortunately, I cannot draw upon quips like "Windows is only free if your time is worth nothing" since Windows is not free. I have a copy of Windows 11 Professional that cost significantly more than any given component of the computer it runs on.

I would recommend giving Linux Mint a try. It's very newbie friendly with a desktop like environment of Windows, automatic backup creation, and a store to install pretty much any software you need from. I got my elderly parents to try it & they were both able to figure it out quite quickly!

I also hear good things about ZorinOS as it's built as a full fledged Windows alternative with built-in WINE to run native Windows apps in

You can play with them both at this link without having to install anything:

https://distrosea.com/

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