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Comment by martijn_himself | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: is one better off using Apple's hardware and OS or is Linux the only alternative?

Just spend the 1-2 weeks learning Ubuntu or any other distro. It is so worth it in so many ways, to at least familiarize yourself with the UI. A lot of people think Linux is too hard, or too clunky but it's honestly not for the vast majority of tasks. It just has a switching cost like anything else.

The major issue with any Linux distro is the multiple ways it can break and when it happens, you either have to be very knowledgable in that particular distro and software installed, or you need to pay for support so they can fix it. In the past, I've resorted to make a script that check various forums for issues mentioning updates waiting. If non have popped up after 1 week, the updates is probably safe to install. Probably includes when it isn't, and can easily result in a full day of downtime trying to fix a X11 driver problem until the specifics and canonical workarounds have been learned.

I simply don't have time for that on a day to day basis where I need my machines to just work. I need it to work to the extend that I now have a base machine running Windows and with VMWare Workstation installed. All production work is done inside a VM with daily snapshots so I can always go back to before it was broken, and then tackle the issue when I have time for it. If my machine suddenly goes up in smoke, I can restore my production machines on another machine. I never have more downtime than buying a new machine, installing VMWare WS, and restoring my VMs results in.

Honest question: when was the last time you used Linux or Ubuntu? I haven't seen an X11 issue in years. Your argument still has merit, I've been burned on misconfigured packages in the past. But for everyday use (browser, text/image editing, chat, docs, etc) these problems simply don't exist. The network, print, display, and audio drivers have gotten very good if not on-par with Windows.

About a year ago I switched back. Ubuntu doesn't really feel like it's providing me anything Windows cannot, and Arch tends to go down burning when it is most needed to be reliable.

My biggest problem was multiple monitors. The setup was, and still is, an absolute pain to get working properly with difference screen size and dynamic docking/undocking of a laptop.

Hardware, perhaps. OS, probably not.

Transparency is a dependency of trust. While many components of OS X are open-source, even more are entirely proprietary and opaque, and therefore untrustworthy. Not to mention that Apple is the king of absurdly-long-and-unreadable EULAs.

Apple are just as bad as Microsoft. And some Linux distro's are headed in this direction too (Ubuntu).

Agree! Ubuntu and similar, along with zeitgeist pre-installed, do exactly the same.

As far as I know, Zeitgeist doesn't send that information to anywhere (it's kept in the computer), so I don't see how it's even nearly the same.

I don't like the bloat, but I don't see it as more privacy invading than any other system logs.

Zeitgeist stores your information on it's datahub, where 3rd party applications can retrieve it from. Nothing prevents such applications from sending this information elsewhere, once accessed.

As this comes out-of-the-box by default, and is in fact a pain to switch off, I compare it to this new windows behavior.

All your criticisms apply to syslogd as well: it stores your information in a central location (/var/log), which 3rd party applications can read and upload to somewhere else, and lots of software expects it to be there, so it can be a pain to switch off too.

Should we compare syslogd to the new Windows behaviour?

A normal user application, i.e. firefox, should not have access /var/log/messages. The zeitgeist db can be queried by any application running with the users privilege. Although to be fair the fedora 22 installation I'm running allows me read the logs launching journalctl as a user, so there's that. I don't think zeitgeist has much to do with the Windows behaviour (or with the scopes behaviour). It's just a potential security risk, albeit a minor one.

A normal user application, i.e. firefox, should not have access /var/log/messages. The zeitgeist db can be queried by any application running with the users privilege.

Zeitgeist itself runs with the users privilege (it's not a system daemon, it's started by the user's session), so that hypothetical application could simply log the data itself. There's no leak of information to underprivileged processes.

I know that, what I meant was that there is information stored about the past, that a malicious application could not get otherwise (i.e. it can record stuff only from the moment it is installed).

On similar note, I rememember someone arguing that the baloo/nepomuk db was a security threat, I guess since it makes slightly easier to search among the files on the system for a string like "password".

Both claims are technically true, and in neither case I believe they are practically relevant, neither for security nor for privacy. I was nitpicking, I guess.

I was referring to user data, not program data/log (despite it can as well containing some user data in some way).

Syslogd can be compared to windows event logs.

I'm not sure it's fair to say that Apple is "as bad as Microsoft" in this regard quite yet.

What guidelines should I go by when checking out a Linux distro to see if it is in the same ballpark or not?

Usually, free software comes with privacy and privacy comes with free software, so the first thing that you should look for is the distribution's policies on free software. Distributions like Debian and Fedora, for example, have a strong commitment to free software (see Debian's Social Contract[0] and Fedora's licensing guidelines[1]) and are not going to spy on you or put ads on your system. The Free Software Foundation maintains a list of distributions that contain only free software[2], and these distributions aren't going to collect your data and send it to third parties without your consent either.

Ubuntu, on the other hand, does not have such a commitment to free software, and has included Amazon ads in the Unity dash in the past.

[0]: https://www.debian.org/social_contract

[1]: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:Main

[2]: https://gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html

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