linuxmemes

In addition to what others have said, there's the move towards containerized applications on Linux via flatpaks, immutable distributions, and snapshots/rollbacks. There are also distributions like Debian with a delayed package release schedule for added stability and security. Its my understanding that you could have an exceptionally secure, effectively trustless, Linux system beyond what is possible on Mac or Windows.

Sort of an aside, but I am seeing Microsoft more as a hostile entity that I need to protect myself from.

Its not and everyone who says it does is full of shit. The reason linux doesnt need av is that av is secretly overrated

Few things, in rough order:

• Smaller = less attack surface. You can strip a Linux OS down to only what is needed.

• Open source, so it's can be peered review. There are Unix distros like OpenBSD, that share lot of user space component options, where auditing is a big thing. The whole sunlight and oxygen stops things festering as much. As abosed to things locked in a box in another box down in a cellar.

• Open source transparency forces corporates to be better. We can see what they are and aren't doing.

• Diversity. The is no "Linux", it's a ecosystem of Linux distros all built and configured differently, using different components. Think of Linux as just a type of base board in a sea of Unix Lego bits. There are plenty of big deployments on BSD bases that share a lot with some Linux deployments.

• Unix security is simplier than Windows security, so easer to not mess up.

If you follow the philosophy that it follows, that is, giving the least possible permission to any application, to make it work, it easily becomes much more secure than Windows.

On the other hand, if you log into your GUI desktop as root, Bill Gates save you.

Because you can own your system and inspect and alter all of it in case it's needed.

I think this is a misconception.

In the 90s it may have been true - windows was focused on user experience on the desktop. Pre- internet, security just wasn't relevant.

Even in that era though, Linux was running on servers in universities et cetera managing many users.

I guess this is where the reputation arose.

These days I don't think either is inherently more secure than another in a general sense.

For specific uses cases one might be more "reliable" than another just because it's used more and therefore has more people looking at it. For example, the vast majority of Web servers are in a Linux environment, but the vast majority of on premise email servers would be Windows.

What I'm saying is, in 2024 the general security of each platform is going to be comparable, and only a very small component in your chain of reliability. Like if you develop a threat model, and write policies, and maintain behaviours in practice, the underlying security provided by the environment isn't really that relevant.

In general it is. Opensource software has less bugs that proprietary. And even those bugs can be mitigated with hardening.

It isn't.

However security software for Linux usually doesn't operate in kernel level usually. And it doesn't brick your bios.

That being said because of how Linux works it is much more possible to safe a bricked Linux machine than a Windows machine.