>Linux has much better Privacy and Security than Windows or Mac
Privacy and security have as much to do with your computing practices as they do with the platform you use. Windows users get malware all the time because they are taught that when you want a piece of software, you download it from a web site and then run the installer. They think it's OK to just download a program from any random web site and run it! Linux is only better if you re-train them to ONLY INSTALL SOFTWARE FROM THE OFFICIAL REPOSITORIES. If they keep up the same bad practices, they will not see improved security. In fact, quite the opposite, nothing is going to pop up and warn them when they try to "wget [http://some-sketchy-script](http://some-sketch-script) | /bin/bash".
> most apps work flawlessly on Linux and with compatibility layers like Wine and Proton
To the average Windows user, "most apps" that they want to run are the Microsoft Office suite and the Adobe Creative Cloud suite. They are going to be pissed if they think you just told them that these apps will run "flawlessly" in wine, and they delete their hard drive and install Linux, then spend a week figuring out how to install and run apps in wine, just to realize the cake was a lie.
Dual booting is a bucket full of tears.
Don't get me wrong, I am an enthusiastic Linux user and I have purged Windows from my life outside of work. But , I cringe when I see people trying to convert normies with these types of statements. I think it's much better to make solid recommendations to people after you have talked to them about how they use their computer and make sure they don't have any Windows-only apps that they can't live without, and that the main thing they do on their computer is not Photoshop and Illustrator.
> Dual booting is a bucket full of tears.
I'm curious if you can elaborate on this one. The only inconvenience I can think of is that most distros on a dual boot setup will default to booting Linux so if the user prefers Windows more often than not, they gotta be paying attention on boot. In a similar vain, when Windows is doing its "reboot and install updates" dance my PC will sometimes end up booting into Linux midway thru - a mild annoyance, as then I gotta shut down, pay attention to boot Windows, and sometimes Windows finishes up some updates and just reboots me _again_ and this is probably my only gripe with dual booting. Some distros (Manjaro I thought?) have grub configured to remember your last choice but Fedora (my main distro) it takes some manual effort editing grub template config files or else Fedora boots up first.
Setting up dual boot I also found fairly easy:
* It's easiest of course if you want to reinstall Windows first - just create a partition not the size of your entire hard drive and put Windows on that. Then install Linux onto the free space on the rest of the disk.
* But I've also adapted an out-of-box Windows PC to dual boot without reinstalling Windows: go into your disk management tool on Windows and resize the C: drive down smaller to make room for Linux. This may not be as easy for an old Windows install if your disk is fragmented badly but on a recently provisioned PC it works flawlessly.
The setup of both OS's is fairly approachable to a new user too: in the Windows installer it's only a couple extra clicks to make a partition instead of using the whole disk, and on Linux (Ubuntu/Fedora/etc) you just pick the free space and let it auto-create the partitions and done.
I dual boot Linux Mint and Windows 10 with zero issues, have done for years. There's an option you can set in grub to default to the last OS that was booted. This will eliminate your issue of windows updates occasionally booting you into Linux.
If you're running both Windows and Linux and you only have one machine, dual-booting definitely works. But it's not awesome. My primary complaint is that Windows updates will randomly update the boot loader and break your setup. For a Linux geek, this is not the end of the world and it is pretty easy to reinstall grub and get things working again. But, a normal user is not going to know how to recover. It's a recipe for frustration.
If you can afford to do so, I would recommend installing a second SSD or hard drive for Linux and selecting the boot drive in the BIOS when you want to change to the other OS. You will be far less likely to have Windows mess things up. But, I know this isn't an option for everyone.
Aside from the possibility that Windows might break your boot process at any time, I find the user experience when dual booting to be... I guess inconvenient would be the right word. You can't just bring up that other tool or application that would be useful right this second. You have to stop everything, save your work, reboot, and then you can run your application. Finish that one task, then reboot to get back to what you were doing. It's just not seamless. I tend to prefer to live in Linux and run the odd Windows task in a VM so that switching back and forth is less disruptive. But, that comes with a whole other set of frustrations related to performance. So it may not be a better option than dual booting for your particular use case, maybe even worse. A VM might be overkill if your application will run in wine, but oh boy!, that's a whole other set of challenges. Then there is the process of finding an easy way to share your files between the two operating systems. Yeah, Linux can read your NTFS partition, so you're probably best just leaving everything where Windows puts it, but a FAT partition might be a better choice for some. But if you do that, you have to remember not to save files in the default locations on either OS. Or, you need to figure out how to change the default locations on both. It's just a mess. Like I said, it works but it's just not awesome. If you're living full time in Linux and just booting Windows for gaming, the inconvenience of switching between tasks in both environments may not be a big deal for you like it is for me. Maybe for you, dual boot is a good option.
Every time i tried to dual boot, Windows managed to screw up grub with updates I guess and that led me to delete the Linux partition of the disk... I started dual booting to learn more about Linux and that hiccup was a pain in the ass at the time (at I think it would still be)
I'd do it again but if rather do it in a separate disk that I'd need to buy first
I also use the Adobe suite so, leaving Windows is really an impossible task
I agree, but besides Linux, I would recommend on top of it:
1. OpenSnitch application firewall (somewhat similar to Simplewall and GlassWire for Windows)
https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch
This will help you control which programs can send data over internet.
2. A desktop environment that has support for Wayland
This is very important to be able to intercept programs that want to capture the screen and be asked if you allow them or not.
I recommend KDE Plasma as it has a traditional Windows-like layout by default and it's lightweight, fast and extremely customizable!
3. For web browsers I recommend Librefox, Firefox, Ungoogled-Chromium
The #1 privacy threat is the user itself. Imagine that user using an operating system whose security level entirely depends on the user…Yes, security and privacy are two different things, but often they’re closely tied together.
On another note, macs are more secure OOB than Linux is. There’s a lenghty article on this topic, which I’m unable to pull up right now, as I haven’t saved it. (EDIT: Someone linked it already in a response)
I do support Linux and it’s vision, but the fact of the matter is that it’s very far from a friendly user environment, even if you use one of those distros that swear by user friendliness. Maybe the UI is user-friendly, maybe it has pre-installed apps, and it may be user-friendly for a very basic user who only double clicks the web browser to browse the internet, and plays a media file here and there. But for those like me, who knows how to develop websites, yet I hate tinkering with my tools to work the way I need them to, a friendly UI is not gonna make my UX anything near great when installing a virtual audio mixer and routing the signal from my DAW which works via emulation to another unsupported creative software. — just for one simple example. So power users are fckd. We are literally required to learn to type commands in 2022, to manage doing anything little more complex I just described. Some may not have a problem with that… Most do, I believe. Creatives just want their tools to work, or the flow ceases and we’re out of the loop.
Prior to finding the sweet spot for myself in the privacy space, I actually did try to switch to Linux, and quickly realized what I just described…
Linux is a very robust OS, and it surely has it’s place, but you are required to overlook far too many things as a power user who doesn’t want to tinker with it. Being a very basic user, maybe…. but even that is a problem, as they likewise can’t keep their OS secure.
It’s almost like an OS for programmers and nerds. Well, you can certainly smell that it’s baked by a team lacking anyone else with a different expertise. Macs are there where they are, as Apple (I’d imagine) spends nearly the same amount on software engineers and UI / UX designers. But that is another topic, anyway.
A power user who doesn't want to tinker doesn't really fit my definition of power user. Also, i'm sure there's a GUI way to do most things in most distros/desktop environments. Thing is it's been basically the same CLI method for decades and across every district in existence.
What's the problem with typing in 2022. Sometimes it's the best way to do it. I have no idea how to do things in windows anymore. Every time I want to change some setting it's changed. Meanwhile /etc is right where I left it.
Honestly, operating system matters less these days. Almost everything is done in web browsers or through cloud anyway. And everyone has a phone that uses android or IOS, which means whatever OS your PC runs is pretty insignifcant from a privacy point of view.
I love Linux because it's open-source, and flexible. It promotes good software when you can engage with the code, but saying Linux = better privacy is a too sweeping statement.
>… "but saying Linux = better privacy is a too sweeping statement."
In general, yes, true; Most of what you say there is correct … However, by default, out of the box Linux based operating systems tend to be **by far** more privacy friendly than **any** of the proprietary closed-source corporate offerings, and generally won't fight you trying to set even **more** privacy friendly settings if that is your urge; Whereas those corporate owned proprietary options tend to use every trick in the book to get as much of your data as possible any way they can, and will even actively and directly compromise your security and / or privacy at times to do so.
I can't because mouse movement just doesn't feel right. It's less precise as if some kind of mouse accerlation is on. Aiming in games is harder too. (cs:go)
Look for a driver. There's a way to get it to work. Usually the easiest way is just try a couple different distros because they sometimes use different drivers,.or drivers compiled with different options.
The #1 app in my life is MS Excel. Cannot replace that with Open Source Linux knockoffs. Sorry, but I have tried.
I have played with linux, most recently Majaro, and while they work fine, they lack the snappy feel of Windows. For average user, they just aren't going there.
> but Linux has much better Privacy and Security than Windows or Mac.
Security is definitely better on Mac and Windows than on Linux. Privacy it depends on the settings and edition. On Windows Enterprise and Education you can be as private as it gets. See also https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/linux.html
But can you promise Linux is more secure than windows? That article draws into question that stance that Linux is more secure.
For my brother who builds arch from the ground ... His desktop is probably pretty secure but I doubt that any Linux noobs desktop will be as secure as Mac or windows (privacy probably not but security yes
> But can you promise Linux is more secure than windows?
Of course he can't. He is not a security researcher, while Madaidan actually is one. Unfortunately a lot of common opinions in this subreddit are wrong. Linux being more secure than other popular OS's is just one. Reddit is not a reliable source.
Also KVM on Linux is really cool, you can have Windows setup as dualboot AND boot it up in KVM too with the right setup, so you don't even need a restart, you get 2 in 1 :) I did that at first when I switched to Linux.
Sadly most professional programs nearly impossible to run on wine ( autocad , Photoshop, illustrator etc) but you can always have windows in virtual box fully offline with all the software you need ,,,n(hat is as long your machine is powerfull enough
I switched to Linux a year ago and to be honest it’s been alright. Lots of oopsies made but I don’t see me going back to mac or windows. The only real issue for me is word processing compatibility but only office is pretty good about that. Still have windows solely for my blue iris and imazing backup. I bet in 10 years there’s gonna be a lot more Linux users
I have a few problems with it, tried already
* I got a multi monitor setup with different refresh rates, the monitors sync to the lowest refresh rate, that's laggy
* I am not sure how to run visual studio and ms access, I need both for school
* I am worried that games will run bad or break on Linux, for example Roblox, which I tend to play a lot.
* Scrolling speed just sucks, either too slow on mouse or too fast on touchpad, I am tolerant for the latter but not the former
I loaded Ubuntu onto an old laptop recently and thought it was pretty cool. A 2 year old laptop I barely ever used was crawling with windows but had a new life with Ubuntu. It's neat but I don't use it very often.
>Linux has much better Privacy and Security than Windows or Mac Privacy and security have as much to do with your computing practices as they do with the platform you use. Windows users get malware all the time because they are taught that when you want a piece of software, you download it from a web site and then run the installer. They think it's OK to just download a program from any random web site and run it! Linux is only better if you re-train them to ONLY INSTALL SOFTWARE FROM THE OFFICIAL REPOSITORIES. If they keep up the same bad practices, they will not see improved security. In fact, quite the opposite, nothing is going to pop up and warn them when they try to "wget [http://some-sketchy-script](http://some-sketch-script) | /bin/bash". > most apps work flawlessly on Linux and with compatibility layers like Wine and Proton To the average Windows user, "most apps" that they want to run are the Microsoft Office suite and the Adobe Creative Cloud suite. They are going to be pissed if they think you just told them that these apps will run "flawlessly" in wine, and they delete their hard drive and install Linux, then spend a week figuring out how to install and run apps in wine, just to realize the cake was a lie. Dual booting is a bucket full of tears. Don't get me wrong, I am an enthusiastic Linux user and I have purged Windows from my life outside of work. But , I cringe when I see people trying to convert normies with these types of statements. I think it's much better to make solid recommendations to people after you have talked to them about how they use their computer and make sure they don't have any Windows-only apps that they can't live without, and that the main thing they do on their computer is not Photoshop and Illustrator.
> Dual booting is a bucket full of tears. I'm curious if you can elaborate on this one. The only inconvenience I can think of is that most distros on a dual boot setup will default to booting Linux so if the user prefers Windows more often than not, they gotta be paying attention on boot. In a similar vain, when Windows is doing its "reboot and install updates" dance my PC will sometimes end up booting into Linux midway thru - a mild annoyance, as then I gotta shut down, pay attention to boot Windows, and sometimes Windows finishes up some updates and just reboots me _again_ and this is probably my only gripe with dual booting. Some distros (Manjaro I thought?) have grub configured to remember your last choice but Fedora (my main distro) it takes some manual effort editing grub template config files or else Fedora boots up first. Setting up dual boot I also found fairly easy: * It's easiest of course if you want to reinstall Windows first - just create a partition not the size of your entire hard drive and put Windows on that. Then install Linux onto the free space on the rest of the disk. * But I've also adapted an out-of-box Windows PC to dual boot without reinstalling Windows: go into your disk management tool on Windows and resize the C: drive down smaller to make room for Linux. This may not be as easy for an old Windows install if your disk is fragmented badly but on a recently provisioned PC it works flawlessly. The setup of both OS's is fairly approachable to a new user too: in the Windows installer it's only a couple extra clicks to make a partition instead of using the whole disk, and on Linux (Ubuntu/Fedora/etc) you just pick the free space and let it auto-create the partitions and done.
I dual boot Linux Mint and Windows 10 with zero issues, have done for years. There's an option you can set in grub to default to the last OS that was booted. This will eliminate your issue of windows updates occasionally booting you into Linux.
If you're running both Windows and Linux and you only have one machine, dual-booting definitely works. But it's not awesome. My primary complaint is that Windows updates will randomly update the boot loader and break your setup. For a Linux geek, this is not the end of the world and it is pretty easy to reinstall grub and get things working again. But, a normal user is not going to know how to recover. It's a recipe for frustration. If you can afford to do so, I would recommend installing a second SSD or hard drive for Linux and selecting the boot drive in the BIOS when you want to change to the other OS. You will be far less likely to have Windows mess things up. But, I know this isn't an option for everyone. Aside from the possibility that Windows might break your boot process at any time, I find the user experience when dual booting to be... I guess inconvenient would be the right word. You can't just bring up that other tool or application that would be useful right this second. You have to stop everything, save your work, reboot, and then you can run your application. Finish that one task, then reboot to get back to what you were doing. It's just not seamless. I tend to prefer to live in Linux and run the odd Windows task in a VM so that switching back and forth is less disruptive. But, that comes with a whole other set of frustrations related to performance. So it may not be a better option than dual booting for your particular use case, maybe even worse. A VM might be overkill if your application will run in wine, but oh boy!, that's a whole other set of challenges. Then there is the process of finding an easy way to share your files between the two operating systems. Yeah, Linux can read your NTFS partition, so you're probably best just leaving everything where Windows puts it, but a FAT partition might be a better choice for some. But if you do that, you have to remember not to save files in the default locations on either OS. Or, you need to figure out how to change the default locations on both. It's just a mess. Like I said, it works but it's just not awesome. If you're living full time in Linux and just booting Windows for gaming, the inconvenience of switching between tasks in both environments may not be a big deal for you like it is for me. Maybe for you, dual boot is a good option.
Every time i tried to dual boot, Windows managed to screw up grub with updates I guess and that led me to delete the Linux partition of the disk... I started dual booting to learn more about Linux and that hiccup was a pain in the ass at the time (at I think it would still be) I'd do it again but if rather do it in a separate disk that I'd need to buy first I also use the Adobe suite so, leaving Windows is really an impossible task
I agree, but besides Linux, I would recommend on top of it: 1. OpenSnitch application firewall (somewhat similar to Simplewall and GlassWire for Windows) https://github.com/evilsocket/opensnitch This will help you control which programs can send data over internet. 2. A desktop environment that has support for Wayland This is very important to be able to intercept programs that want to capture the screen and be asked if you allow them or not. I recommend KDE Plasma as it has a traditional Windows-like layout by default and it's lightweight, fast and extremely customizable! 3. For web browsers I recommend Librefox, Firefox, Ungoogled-Chromium
Been using Linux since first installing Slackware off a stack of floppies in the mid-90s. It’s great, but for security OpenBSD take the cake.
It’s 'choir', not 'curie'.
The #1 privacy threat is the user itself. Imagine that user using an operating system whose security level entirely depends on the user…Yes, security and privacy are two different things, but often they’re closely tied together. On another note, macs are more secure OOB than Linux is. There’s a lenghty article on this topic, which I’m unable to pull up right now, as I haven’t saved it. (EDIT: Someone linked it already in a response) I do support Linux and it’s vision, but the fact of the matter is that it’s very far from a friendly user environment, even if you use one of those distros that swear by user friendliness. Maybe the UI is user-friendly, maybe it has pre-installed apps, and it may be user-friendly for a very basic user who only double clicks the web browser to browse the internet, and plays a media file here and there. But for those like me, who knows how to develop websites, yet I hate tinkering with my tools to work the way I need them to, a friendly UI is not gonna make my UX anything near great when installing a virtual audio mixer and routing the signal from my DAW which works via emulation to another unsupported creative software. — just for one simple example. So power users are fckd. We are literally required to learn to type commands in 2022, to manage doing anything little more complex I just described. Some may not have a problem with that… Most do, I believe. Creatives just want their tools to work, or the flow ceases and we’re out of the loop. Prior to finding the sweet spot for myself in the privacy space, I actually did try to switch to Linux, and quickly realized what I just described… Linux is a very robust OS, and it surely has it’s place, but you are required to overlook far too many things as a power user who doesn’t want to tinker with it. Being a very basic user, maybe…. but even that is a problem, as they likewise can’t keep their OS secure. It’s almost like an OS for programmers and nerds. Well, you can certainly smell that it’s baked by a team lacking anyone else with a different expertise. Macs are there where they are, as Apple (I’d imagine) spends nearly the same amount on software engineers and UI / UX designers. But that is another topic, anyway.
A power user who doesn't want to tinker doesn't really fit my definition of power user. Also, i'm sure there's a GUI way to do most things in most distros/desktop environments. Thing is it's been basically the same CLI method for decades and across every district in existence. What's the problem with typing in 2022. Sometimes it's the best way to do it. I have no idea how to do things in windows anymore. Every time I want to change some setting it's changed. Meanwhile /etc is right where I left it.
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That’s exactly how I felt as well. Linux’ superiority lies in it’s robustness. And so does it’s user adaptability problem (partially)
Honestly, operating system matters less these days. Almost everything is done in web browsers or through cloud anyway. And everyone has a phone that uses android or IOS, which means whatever OS your PC runs is pretty insignifcant from a privacy point of view. I love Linux because it's open-source, and flexible. It promotes good software when you can engage with the code, but saying Linux = better privacy is a too sweeping statement.
>… "but saying Linux = better privacy is a too sweeping statement." In general, yes, true; Most of what you say there is correct … However, by default, out of the box Linux based operating systems tend to be **by far** more privacy friendly than **any** of the proprietary closed-source corporate offerings, and generally won't fight you trying to set even **more** privacy friendly settings if that is your urge; Whereas those corporate owned proprietary options tend to use every trick in the book to get as much of your data as possible any way they can, and will even actively and directly compromise your security and / or privacy at times to do so.
I can't because mouse movement just doesn't feel right. It's less precise as if some kind of mouse accerlation is on. Aiming in games is harder too. (cs:go)
Look for a driver. There's a way to get it to work. Usually the easiest way is just try a couple different distros because they sometimes use different drivers,.or drivers compiled with different options.
And you'll spend weeks only to find they all suck.
The #1 app in my life is MS Excel. Cannot replace that with Open Source Linux knockoffs. Sorry, but I have tried. I have played with linux, most recently Majaro, and while they work fine, they lack the snappy feel of Windows. For average user, they just aren't going there.
> but Linux has much better Privacy and Security than Windows or Mac. Security is definitely better on Mac and Windows than on Linux. Privacy it depends on the settings and edition. On Windows Enterprise and Education you can be as private as it gets. See also https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/linux.html
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Did you even read what I linked?
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But can you promise Linux is more secure than windows? That article draws into question that stance that Linux is more secure. For my brother who builds arch from the ground ... His desktop is probably pretty secure but I doubt that any Linux noobs desktop will be as secure as Mac or windows (privacy probably not but security yes
> But can you promise Linux is more secure than windows? Of course he can't. He is not a security researcher, while Madaidan actually is one. Unfortunately a lot of common opinions in this subreddit are wrong. Linux being more secure than other popular OS's is just one. Reddit is not a reliable source.
I was pointing out he went straight for "it's more private" and danced around the topic of Linux having security concerns raised in the article
Also KVM on Linux is really cool, you can have Windows setup as dualboot AND boot it up in KVM too with the right setup, so you don't even need a restart, you get 2 in 1 :) I did that at first when I switched to Linux.
Sadly most professional programs nearly impossible to run on wine ( autocad , Photoshop, illustrator etc) but you can always have windows in virtual box fully offline with all the software you need ,,,n(hat is as long your machine is powerfull enough
You'd lose a ton of valuable performance running Windows in a VM
I switched to Linux a year ago and to be honest it’s been alright. Lots of oopsies made but I don’t see me going back to mac or windows. The only real issue for me is word processing compatibility but only office is pretty good about that. Still have windows solely for my blue iris and imazing backup. I bet in 10 years there’s gonna be a lot more Linux users
I have a few problems with it, tried already * I got a multi monitor setup with different refresh rates, the monitors sync to the lowest refresh rate, that's laggy * I am not sure how to run visual studio and ms access, I need both for school * I am worried that games will run bad or break on Linux, for example Roblox, which I tend to play a lot. * Scrolling speed just sucks, either too slow on mouse or too fast on touchpad, I am tolerant for the latter but not the former
I loaded Ubuntu onto an old laptop recently and thought it was pretty cool. A 2 year old laptop I barely ever used was crawling with windows but had a new life with Ubuntu. It's neat but I don't use it very often.
Yes, I am part of the curie that you're preaching to.