A circular saw is a tool, one without a handguard is a bad tool even if it cuts wood well.
./run-saw --yes-without-the-guard
Also, some of the most common practices on Linux that are claimed to be superior from a security standpoint are just bad. For example, the package manager is very nice, but when you want to install anything that is not in the official repos, your options get just as bad as windows, or worse, despite what many people think. A common recommendation in advanced projects is to add their apt/yum repo to your system, which is not only equivalent to downloading stuff off the internet, it is also you registering them as trusted to deliver updates to your system forever. On Windows, you at least have some anti-virus tool scanning for known malware, so you still have a small chance that you won't be allowed to run some well known malware from years ago.
Strongly disagree. The linux desktop has something like 1% of the marketshare and is far from the lowest hanging fruit. And basic, sane security defaults are plenty good for simple web browsing and emailing.
My grandma used to get calls 2-3 times a month from "Microsoft" and "Comcast" trying to get her to download team viewer and cough up some passwords to Windows 8. She eventually got phished by downloading something dumb via email. I put her on the Ubuntus, with some tweaks, and she's doing fine. 10/10 would do it again.
> For example, the package manager is very nice, but when you want to install anything that is not in the official repos, your options get just as bad as windows, or worse
Grandma ain't installing Steam or an obscure 3rd party metasploit framework -- standard Ubanto repos are fine. She doesn't need rpmfusion to access Office365 emails.
> On Windows, you at least have some anti-virus tool scanning for known malware
Clam-AV is a thing in Linux and works fine -- we used it on mail relays a while back and had decent results. If you're putting trust in the default MS virus protection you're naive.
Also, from what I've seen, custom updaters are still the most common way of delivering updates for Linux outside the distribution-maintained official repo, as most people ship software for many distributions, and maintaining one repo per distribution quickly gets annoying. Ironically, this wouldn't be a problem on Windows or MacOS, if they decided to include a package manager with support for custom repos (the app stores allow side-loading, but do not allow custom upstream, as far as I know).
I can understand the mic being always on as a privacy nightmare, but how is this a security nightmare?
That is the price to pay when only technical minded users are the target group.
Consolidation and lack of competition makes for a worse experience.
Not everything is perfect, yes moving the toolchain would be nice, but then again, most a community run projects, so the user needs to know about locking their basement as well. Hence the audience is/should be more technical minded anyways.
IMHO another post about comparing apples and oranges leaving out second-level effects. Just an example: Looking for CVE-entries https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=MacOS , https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=Linux , https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=Windows . We see that MacOS has the fewest and Windows the most CVEs. (So it doesn't matter that Microsoft closes the CVEs quickly and Debian might take some time (haven't really run metrics on that one), there is a huge attack-surface on Windows, compared to Linux and new once have to pop up all the time :D) That isn't looking into severity, because a chaining of medium CVEs might also lead to a compromise as well ,and not everything requires system or root. User might be fine as well. I see a reflection of favoured OS. Only few people use MacOS (some artists, companies streamlining their assets for maintenance and rent,etc.). Windows, on the other hand, was always the big dog on the desktop market. Naturally, maleware authors focus on the biggest market.