Your Linux machine is neither a walled garden nor a gate; it's an unlocked house in the countryside. Its lack of privacy problems is because it's not a target.

Have you built something from source by downloading a tarball and running `make install`? Did you look at the Makefile before you did so?

It's a walled garden because the default way to install apps is from the repository, a trusted source that isn't filled with spyware. The gate is that I can download and run software without it. It's the best of both worlds and has been before app stores existed. An unlocked house in the countryside would be running software without my intent, the only place that happens is inside the browser.

You trust the app store just as I trust the repositories, I just have other choices available as well.

> Have you built something from source by downloading a tarball and running `make install`? Did you look at the Makefile before you did so?

Again, it's all about trust.

Under this model companies like google can even build their own extensions to the garden.

As a Linux user I agree with GP that Linux is only as safe as it is because it's not a target. It's pretty clear that large tech companies cannot be trusted, I definitely wouldn't run a binary provided by Facebook on my machine. I am hesitant about running apps like Slack and Dropbox, and would prefer not to give them full access to my user account[0], but I need to use them so. Desktop container technologies are maturing nicely, so hopefully one day we'll have permission prompts where we can restrict what an app can access.

[0] Yes I understand I could run them as a different user but that's not very user friendly at the moment.

You could use Apparmor.

I don't understand. Some Linux machines I'm responsible for are targets. I build what few things I need from source in a sandbox, fetch the source from entities I trust and verify the integrity. And yes, I do read the code, because if I'm building it that usually means I needed to patch it.

So your Linux machines are like military facilities in the middle of nowhere. Guarded and hard to break into.

But most people's Linux machines aren't like that. Most people don't build in a sandbox, don't verify trust chains and integrity, don't read the code. It's configure && make && sudo make install. This works because evildoers and assholes are too busy ruining lives of people using Windows, Android and iOS (and, increasingly, MacOS) to notice the small and tech-savvy Linux crowd.

Most people install from the Ubuntu software centre or the distros equivalent which is vetted software, just like apples store. It's been that way since before there was an Apple app store.

Even for power users configure and make is a last resort or something only developers will do for specific reasons.

You have a strange idea of what desktop Linux is like.

You don't think desktop Linux users use pip or npm?

(Also, speaking as a distro packager, we don't do as much vetting as Apple does and we certainly don't do as much sandboxing. We're generally volunteers.)

> You don't think desktop Linux users use pip or npm?

Most won't, only developers. Even there I'd say linux has an advantage because many of the dependencies in tools like that can be included by the distro itself. It hasn't worked well in practice so far but in theory it's a better solution.

This is also identical across operating systems so it's hardly an example of one being superior to the other.

> Also, speaking as a distro packager, we don't do as much vetting as Apple does and we certainly don't do as much sandboxing.

I'm sure the vetting could be much stricter, but so far in practice it has not been an issue so I continue to trust responsible distros (debian, redhat, not arch). I'd also hope some distros like redhat are doing a lot more vetting.

So you've moved beyond the security on the mechanisms of software installation to just saying you trust Apple and don't trust open source software. That's all this boils down to.

The middle of nowhere is not accurate. They have users, who are not experts, and attackers constantly.

And they are much more vanilla Linux distro than I think you expect.

> Its lack of privacy problems is because it's not a target.

My auth.log would respectfully disagree with you.

The typical Linux gardens have caretakers with backgrounds in navy seals and are fully capable of protecting their gardens without gates.

The average iOS and Android users don't even know they are in a garden, much less know how to protect it.

You're looking at the current state and not the model itself.

> The average iOS and Android users don't even know they are in a garden, much less know how to protect it.

If you took those same users and put them on the linux equivalent (ignoring other practicalities) the same will be true, any software they want will be coming from the ubuntu software center or something equivalent and they wouldn't have to protect themselves. Yet they'd still have the freedom to get software from other sources if they wished. Corporate users could build their own repository and have software installed from there without involving anyone else.

Windows didn't have such a malware problem because they gave users the freedom, it was because downloading installers from websites was the default way to install software. Without this history windows could be (I don't know how trusted the windows store should be) in the same position as linux today, with users trained to install what they want from the store but still able to go around it.

The apple desktop is in basically the same situation as windows.

Android isn't a walled garden, you can install apps from elsewhere. Unfortunately the play store isn't a trustworthy source of software like apple store or a linux repository, all sorts of crap ends up there. Google even generates a per device Id to help software track you.

The enforcing of privacy was done at a political level, not at a technical level. Linux (as a group? vague hand-wavy term) focuses hard on the technical merits of its own product, but ignores the ecosystem.