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Re:Microsoft is a national security threat: ex-White House c... by mike_hearn on Monday April 22, 2024 @03:49AM (#40112199)
I think that's maybe more due to lack of demand/effort than any fundamental technical limitation. You can run USB drivers in user mode on both Linux and Windows. If someone paid enough for such support to be added, it'd appear.

A lot of the software getting hacked isn't even truly Windows-specific stuff to begin with though. VPN appliances, firewalls, they're probably all running out of date Linux distros. Active Directory servers could have some open source competitor too, aren't they mostly Kerberos? And for the rest, ChromeOS could knock it off too with a mix of web apps and RDP.

Re:Microsoft is a national security threat: ex-White House c... by mschuster91 on Monday April 22, 2024 @05:31AM (#40112696)
> You can run USB drivers in user mode on both Linux and Windows.

Yeah, but you'd need to rewrite the whole Windows app for a native Linux or macOS port because WINE to my knowledge can't access devices even if there were a Linux/macOS driver.

> Active Directory servers could have some open source competitor too, aren't they mostly Kerberos?

AD is so much more than just LDAP+Kerberos. You have a fully integrated file store, native and direct integration into Exchange (on-prem and cloud), group policies for users and machines, DNS, DHCP, NTP... one vendor, one tech stack, one management way. Set it up and you're done, and even a novice can set up a minimal working small-business environment in a day.

With Linux, you have to integrate/configure Samba (LDAP, GPO, file storage), Heimdall/MIT Kerberos, postfix/exim (Mail), no idea what one could even use for calendar sync, BIND (DNS), ISC DHCP server, Jitsi (Video calls), Mattermost (Teams chats). Each of these software pieces have their own configuration syntax, nothing integrates automatically on its own, guides are sometimes horribly outdated, there's subtle differences in behavior between distributions, some of these tools have web UIs for management, others are CLI, and all of them look and behave differently.

Re:Microsoft is a national security threat: ex-White House c... by mike_hearn on Monday April 22, 2024 @02:13PM (#40117061)
https://wiki.winehq.org/Hardware

"Wine includes some limited support for direct hardware access, including running native Windows drivers. This comes with several restrictions, but we still have been able to successfully access some native devices."

"For example, the SteelSeries USB mouse driver offers the ability to modify the mouse's LED settings as well as simply driving the mouse, and in this case Wine is able to pass through the LED settings"