Regardless of us using Linux on our home computers, most businesses and services use Windows machines. Your information is likely still stored on Windows machines elsewhere if you interact with the world at all.
With that in mind, it’s worth being aware of Windows security problems when they come up.
What would we do when these happen? What could we do in the moment to change anything?
Join an eventual class action?
That’s the big “what if” that hangs over everything isn’t it?
Taking the internet into consideration, I would doubt “most”.
*guitar solo*
Frets On Fire solo
There’s absolutely zero need to mention any other OS than Windows if the article is about Windows.
I guarantee you that 2025 will not be the year of the Linux desktop, just like 2024 wasn’t, and just like 2023 wasn’t, just like 2022 wasn’t…
Signed,
Linux users that aren’t annoying and aren’t driving people away from using Linux with their self-righteous smugness.
Been using linux on my desktop since 1999. Don’t need an official declaration.
i don’t see how this is annoying when it is literally posted to a community called “linuxmemes”
Nah, 2025 is the year of the Linux on the desktop.
we’re sure of it this time!
/s
I mean, I’ve been hearing it for 15 years, we can’t be wrong for that long, right? Which means that next year it’s 100%!
Yeah, I also think with just so few alternatives, just by pure chance alone this should already very probably be the year of Linux on desktop
Hey don’t give up on 2024 yet
Would it even be a good thing if Linux became super main stream? Maybe we should be careful what we wish for.
How would it be bad? More hardware support, more users not feeding data to corporations, more software support and so on.
I’m not sure. I envision a lot of regulatory stuff happening around the kernel as it becomes more popular & vital to infrastructure. As that happens, the direction of it becomes more controlled and eventually maybe becomes unrecognizable.
But maybe the fact it’s open source flat out prevents that?
I really don’t know, I’m not a futurists, I was just internet speculating.
The Linux kernel is already popular & vital to infrastructure, servers and Android exist
That’s true.
But Android getting more & more locked down as time goes on is a good example of what I’m afraid of might start happening once there are too many cooks in the kitchen.
I’m just speculating out of nowhere.
This is just a meme in a linuxmemes community. There is no need to be offended.
Im sure by next december arch will have 51% of desktop os market share.
I don’t.
You are not annoying?
Pretty sure the success of Linux will not ride or die on the Charisma stat of its users.
It’s really sad that this needs to be said. I 100% agree with the sentiment. The reason I use Linux is because most of my work requires Linux, but I resisted it for a really long time because communities like these are just incredibly toxic and insufferable. Sometimes looking at this community makes me want to rage-boot Windows and become a C# dev all over again.
It’s a meme in a linux meme community. You need help lol.
In this case I actually mainly meant MacOS, which has a relatively big market share.Though for me personally it’s Linux, it applies to all other operating systems, with MacOS being the one large enough that people who use windows can’t ignore it. I’m not a fan of these “here’s what you need to know” titles because it doesn’t add anything, the title would be functionally the same without it. I was making fun of this by saying that I don’t need to know this and thus showing that (this part of) the title is only included to get more clicksI actually mainly meant MacOS
Maybe I’m just dumb or something, but you’re really burying the lede on this MacOS angle by having your meme say “Me with linux”
If you think being on Linux makes you immune for attacks, I have bad news for you.
The way I have always liked to put it specifically is that Linux is not inherently more secure than windows. However Linux is inherently easier to secure than Windows. Namespaces, apparmor, seccomp-bpf, and a very fine grain limited vs super user permission system. Just to name a few top level things.
The tools are all there on basically any system, very well documented, relatively easy to use. And once you set them up they will not randomly change things on you. I say this as a system administrator having to deal with Windows constantly where Microsoft decides that they are smarter than you and fuck your group policy edits because we put out this update and we think this option is better so we’re going to revert like half the shit you did. Over half my fucking job and security is just checking what did Microsoft fuck up about my security set up with this update, and trying to rotate through security vendor 2094726 to fill in the absolute basic security processes that windows doesn’t provide
there are much less vulrenabilities on Linux. No system is totally unpenetrable, but having 2-5 vulrebabilities is always better than having 30-40
VMS is really fucking close to impenetrable.
I’ve got a link for you to click, Mr super secure OS user. I promise your OS will protect you.
Do it
Here I have a cool program to install. Just pipe this link into bash really quick…
With sudo. Can’t forget that or it won’t work.
you are just exploiting my words. I never said Linux will protect me whatever happens. But it will have a better protection inherently, than any windows
You’re holding onto a long-standing misconception: Linux is not inherently more secure than Windows. In fact, the opposite can be true.
The reason Linux seems safer is because it has a much smaller market share. Attackers don’t build massive botnets to target misconfigured Linux systems the way they do for Windows. But that’s not security—that’s just security through obscurity, which doesn’t hold up if someone is targeting you specifically.
Let me clarify my earlier point about “a link for you to click.” If an attacker is specifically targeting someone using Linux, they’re not any better protected than someone on Windows. At that point, it comes down to how well the user understands and secures their system.
The key difference? Windows actively warns you about misconfigurations that open you up to attack. For example, try enabling Remote Desktop Protocol—Windows will warn you repeatedly about the risks. Linux, on the other hand, won’t stop you. You can misconfigure SSH, open ports, or skip updates without a single warning. If someone’s after you and you’ve made a mistake? You’re toast.
Linux is powerful, but it doesn’t hold your hand the way Windows does. If you think it’s inherently secure, you’re just relying on the fact that fewer bots are looking for you—not that the system itself is protecting you.
Realistically the difference is in how Linux mitigates the common vectors for attack that Windows doesn’t. Most malware targeting individual workstations gets in by either supply chain attack, vulnerable web renderer or by tricking the user into installing it.
Centralized repositories with centralized build tooling limits opportunities for supply chain attacks, plus helps prevent users from accidentally downloading a Trojan when trying to grab other software. Containerizing web applications helps limit browser exploits, and less “features” phoning home means a default incoming-deny firewall policy will largely prevent most vulnerabilities from being remotely serious.
So for an individual workstation, Linux is significantly safer from viruses. In the enterprise it’s a completely different story where the threat environment does require defense in depth regardless of your choices of vendors
It probably makes you a less likely target though. I suppose that bots scan for known Widows vulnerabilities simply because that platform has a much higher market share among desktop operating systems. Besides, Linux distros offer a unified way to update all your software. On Windows, third-party software is often installed and maintained manually.
Sometimes Mint tells me there are security updates available. Happened just this morning. Updating makes me feel good :)
And it had the Edge of not installing Candy Crush
And put edge back in the taskbar…
And I can do it wherever I want. And my work is in no way interrupted, while the updates go through.
People here running *nix OSes while I run a Nix*OS
Is not having an anti-virus good for most people though?
Anti-virus is not going to stop you from stupidity. You classic “Anti-virus” won’t stop anything more than run of the mill simple stuff.
Most of the time that’s what people need an antivirus for, most attacks the average person will suffer will be some script that’s easily caught by the antivirus.
If the script doesn’t have permission to do anything it doesn’t matter. See Android as an example.
most antivirus apps are very invasive, heavy on resources and even spy on you. Windows defender is usually enough. However, virustotal is still recommended
Is this something that someone who doesn’t have tech as a hobby cares enough about to change they’re os?
I would say yes? Many if my friends in uni were using laptops that had McAfee built in. I’m not exaggerating when I say they were unusable. I removed that shit and those machines were snappy af.
On one side, if you have a brain you’re fine.
On the other side, *glances at general public typing google.com into google* …yeah
I mean… a form of Microsoft Defender is available for Linux, but only for enterprise customers if I remember correctly 😅
Yep, my company allows me to use Linux but for Compliance Reasons I need to have Microsoft Defender installed and running. Still beats Windows 11 by a mile
and it will suck your servers dry.
Eh, it’s not too bad when properly configured.
there is an update, i applied it at the weekend
Bootkitty?
However,
you can already patch your BIOS to become secure again! :)All in all, Windows security is a joke compared to Linux’s.
Windows security is… fine? It could be better, but it’s pretty much on par with linux security. Both have their vulns, but they’re both also able to be secured enough that most (if not all) major data breaches are via phishing or other social engineering attacks, not solely software exploits. There’s lots of fodder for the Linux vs. M$ debate, but this one is maybe a bit out of date.
If you actually dig deeper into the Linux security topic, you’d find out that Linux is actually not very secure. GrapheneOS developers made quite a lot of posts on what Linux distros (and the kernel) are missing in terms of security. A lot of “Linux security and the lack of viruses” rides on the waves of “there is hardly any point of creating malware for a system with such a small user base, plus you have to consider the fact that people knowledgeable enough just to install a Linux distro would be a bit more careful about their computers than the average Joe”.
there is hardly any point of creating malware for a system with such a small user base
Actually the whole world runs on linux, Windows is mostly the low level consumer end.
Which makes your argument true for a certain segment of malware (the cheap low tech stuff more akin to scams etc targeting people en mass but expected to have a low return), but not actually for the parts where the money is that justify elaborate malware and hacks.
The internet runs on linux.
(Webservers, some network equipment, monitoring servers, NAS, DNS, … lots of services can be setup and ran for free on linux. ((Companies like free)))
A lot of companies stuff also runs on linux when it’s not free, just so they can avoid having to manage the hardware side… see: Google Cloud, AWS, Azure etc.
The amount of companies having their whole infrastructure run by one of the big cloud services on linux servers nowadays is far too high to make a serious argument of “linux is only secure because it’s irrelevant and no one cares to break it”.
Most companies like free. Larger companies like support contracts and shifting liability.
Yeah, Linux has SELinux, that thing everyone turns off!
I want a Linux system that is entirely rootless by leveraging containers and service accounts.
Think about it. Instead of having root you could just have a utility that connects to a daemon that is in a sandboxed environment.
And AppArmor
bootkitty wasn’t implemented ever and if you use GUID Partition Table and your bios is set to uefi without csm, it can’t affect you, since Bootkitty embeds itself into the Master Boot Record and there exploits the LogoFail vulrenability (this was already patched btw) with as far as i remember, a self-extracting steganographical bitmap image for arbritary code execution to bypass Secure Boot with injecting face certifications to Moklist. Also, it only runs on select devices, far from all Linux systems are vulrenabe.
uh, you do know there are exploits in Linux right? Stop pretending that Linux is “virus free”
Absolutely nobody is saying that.
