Hello friends, I love linux. I made the switch from Windows a few years ago. Love the fact I dont have to worry about upgrades or buying a new OS later on. Can constanly update packages etc and stay up to date. I feel ike LInux is more secure than windows from the research I have done. From what I read online this seems to be the general consensus as well. I am interested to get the communities overall thoughts on this. Do you feel in general a Linux user is less prone to get malware on their machine from browsing the web?

duplicate?
https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ws-4175673413/

That user's banned already - added spam links to their other post.

"Do you feel in general a Linux user is less prone to get malware on their machine from browsing the web?"

Yes, but that is not necessarily because "Linux is more secure", but because malware makers generally target the OS with the largest installed base (i.e. Windows). There is one significant security advantage Linux has over Windows: Some parts of Windows GUI handling runs in kernel space, in Linux that is all userspace.

And in addition, Linux comes with a lot of tools which you can use ( or not ... ) to harden your system. Windows not so much.

And don't forget: Any OS can be rendered insecure by running badly written software on it, and by poor configuration choices. (E.g. 'solving' problems by chmod 777, or running things as root because you cannot figure out a permissions issue).

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You might want to take a look at this thread: https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ws-4175673413/

What about KMS/DRM and framebuffer? Hehe, just kidding: GDI is indeed much more complex than KMS.
But in Windows there is even HTTP driver in kernel space (http.sys) )

I believe Linux considered more secure because of the following reasons:

1. Open source tools are reviewed by many developers constantly, so it is much harder for hacker to find zero day vulnerability and utilize it without anyone know about it.
See Linus's Law



2. Linux design is generally more simple, while Windows complexity (and obscurity) may lead to security breach: if you do not understand how your system works, then you can't configure is correctly.

DACLs,
privileges, (D)COM, Impersonation,poorly documented services that interact with each other via undocumented RPC, several types of logins, user right assignments, and do not forget those excellent errors!

3. Lots of services with network access run under LocalSystem (the most powerful account). Service named "Server" that provides access to computer via SMB is a good example.

4. Virus writers generally do not care about Linux desktops. There are less number of Linux desktops than Windows, so it is not possible to create huge botnet of them, and it is much harder to "hide" locker-virus or malware on Linux. In Windows there a lot of places in registry to install junk to: you can replace shell (explorer.exe), add stuff to autorun, and there is even way to add some .dll to the address space of each process. This was done to attach debugger initially, but I once seen virus that use it. Registry is binary (and mostly undocumented), so you can't store it in VCS and run "diff" on it easily.

All points are my imho: Windows guys may disagree with them.

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IlyaK it all fades next to user who insists on running xorg as root.
Today the majority of attacks shift towards SE rather than exploiting the software itself. It's all on the news. Absolute majority of ransomware hacks are actually just good ol' links and attachments in spam.

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Using Linux with programs can be unsafe, too.

I know much macro malware which works on LibreOffice and Windows Office.

The problem is that users ignore warnings of the programs and the thy will get a infection by malware or data loss.

An other part of infection are old file protocols like SMB/CIFS.

PDF viewers using ghostscript are often broken and can be uses to get higher privileges.

And so on…

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Theren't verification for security in the repositories "contrib" and "non-free" in Debian (and similar in others). So...

On a system design level, I think it is. But nothing is immune unless you are disconnected from the any network entirely. At the end of the day the most security is safe browsing and good personal habits when it comes to passwords and opening random junk from who knows where. And that won't always save you either. Dangerous world these days. Slight tin foil hat, but it's reality to some degree.

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You could write a program to destroy any system and if you chose to run it with admin privileges, it would. Based on OS design, Linux has a lot more mitigation over Windows because there is a certain amount of "sandboxing" built into it where even malicious code would only be able to affect a certain user portion of data - it could be bad, but would be unlikely to render the system useless.

Having said that, you might consider the OS is nothing to care about and it is your data that is important. I learned that in Windows - always use a different drive for data, not the C drive. Linux has these kind of best practices built in.

So in summary, I think Linux follows a lot more best practices and makes it a lot easier to be safe (compared to Windows). Any user can still make bad choices, of course. One big point to mention though is the paradigm of downloading software from websites and installing - that is the biggest risk and is common practice under Windows. This is bad practice for Linux, which uses repositories and curated software by default. This is probably the biggest factor in many ways because it mitigates human behavior of thinking it is a good idea to Google for a piece of software and download it from the first site that comes up.

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Typical outdated thinking, there's no merit in killing system, you must extract profit from your ops and that is, user data.

Oh there's lots of other ways to make use of your system. Malware to mine data is one thing, but there's cryptominers, botnets, ransomware... most use cases, admin privileges will come in very handy!
I agree that the classical virus (basically a malicious prank, only profit is infamity) is probably not so relevant anymore nowadays.

And for instance running as root makes installing a rootkit on your system much too easy.

is nix more secure than windoze?
wow, loaded question.

here's something to ponder over. w/o any constraints on what i can or cannot do the OS, i can make both very hard and dark, about impossible to compromise, either as a server, or as a multi-end-user OS.

maybe the better question to ask, which we always do in the world of IT Management, how ez is it to do that, how complicated will it be to manage, will it be a bear to upgrade or patch?

so, the question really has no context, and w/o a proper context no one answer will be correct. it's like a diff-eq problem where the solution set is rather infinite because the equation has poor restraints.

cheers.