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Originally Posted by road hazard
With that said, in Windows land, Windows Update would sometimes push out critical patches to the OS to protect against recently discovered exploits.
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The problem with Windows is that Edward Snowden has revealed to us that it is involved in mass surveillance. Same with Apple and Google.
So although M$ may be doing its utmost to keep the bad guy hackers at bay, it's not doing the same with reporting your emails and browsing details to the Govt.
As far as I know, Snowden and Wikileaks have not advised that linux distros are involved in mass surveillance.
So although zero day exploits may be an issue, if you have a linux distro you're
opting-out of mass surveillance.
Of course, if that linux distro has even fewer proprietary software, then common sense suggests you should be even safer. This is where debian is slightly better than Mint.
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I was just confused why some Linux distros ship with kernels from a year or so ago and even after updating your distro, the kernel could very well be at the same "core" level. I now know that sure, I might be using kernel 3.16 in Debian for instance, and after I applied any updates I'm still at 3.16 but the minor minor version is maybe 3.16.44.1.2 (which has been updated to block newly discovered exploits).
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My Firefox browser on Debian is 45.8.0 whilst Mozilla is boasting the latest version is 52.0.1.
I'm just guessing that although debian is always behind on releasing the latest version, nonetheless it's been tested thoroughly and is water-tight against vulnerabilities. But this may not be the case with Mozilla's latest release.
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And I read that Mint article on Distrowatch and to me, it seems the criticism that Mint takes is a bit of FUD.
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The hackers were able to get people to download their corrupt .iso rather than the original Mint .iso. But I think this lasted only one day (
itsfoss.com)
For me that's not such a big deal. Everyone's already got Mint installed! The newbies installing on that day are gonna be small scale. They can re-install the next day.
Importantly, it's not an issue about the distro being hacked (the website was hacked) or having the latest updates.
So in my view, Mint is still robust as a distro - it's just their website that needs sorting out.
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Sure, maybe they should change that first option from "Don't break my computer" to .... "I prefer stability above all else and I'm not worried about zero day exploits".... or something not so scary sounding to n00bs.
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Linux distros don't need firewalls or antivirus. Maybe because of this there will be fewer chances of zero day exploits.
Also, for desktops, all linux distros account for 1.5% of global use (
Wiki). So anyone doing a zero day exploit will get unnoticed by the public. If they do it to Win7 however, they will affect 40% of world desktop users.
So for me, another security benefit is few people use linux desktops, so it'll get hacked less.
