Thread: Is Linux More Secure Than Windows?

  1. #31
    FOX
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    > Someone said that linux is more costumizable.
    Nonsense. To costumize linux you need the proper tools. For windows the same stuff.

    Proper tools... Like an text editor?



    > Window is currently the target of all acusations relative to security for the same reasons of internet explorer. about 90% of computers users use windows. and about 70% of them dont' even know what a security patch or service pack is. Plus 90% of the internet users, use internet explorer which is the swiss cheese of security. Fortunatly opera and ff are getting popular.

    There are certainly more servers out there running Apache than IIS, and which one has got the worst track record?

    The difference between Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer? When a vulnerability is detected in Firefox or Opera, it's promptly fixed. Can you honestly say the same thing about IE? Just google for some horror stories involving IE.

    But I kinda agree with you on this one anyway. Read my first post in this thread.

  2. #32
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    The difference between Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer?
    did I ask anything ?

  3. #33
    FOX
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    It was a rhetorical question.

  4. #34
    FOX
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    xErath: http://it.slashdot.org/it/05/06/26/0...id=201&tid=218
    The comments pretty much says it all about how usable LUA is.
    Last edited by ^xor; 06-26-2005 at 10:57 AM.

  5. #35
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    http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail118.html

    Everybody knows what Linux is...

    I'm thinking of putting that quote, "Let's do a dance for the computer genius man", back in my sig.

  6. #36
    ... kermit's Avatar
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    Since this thread is deteriorating anyway...

    Some people like to do things the hard way - I would say those are the people who like to use Linux.


    xerath mentioned not being able to see a single advantage to using it - My personal favourite advantage of using Linux over Windows, is that Windows does not ship with the Bash shell. I know you can get that for Windows, but it just does not seem as seamless as with a UNIX variant such as Linux or one of the BSDs. I feel lost without a shell.

  7. #37
    Crazy Fool Perspective's Avatar
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    stovellp: you cleary understand the MS approach quite well, but your write up shows that you don't understand the business side of open source at all. Sorry man, but you made all the typical assumptions and you left out all the truth about linux in the enterprise world.

    I don't have time to type up a thousand word report but I'll give you the basic idea:

    You say businesses can't rely on open source projects because they arn't business driven. Your %100 correct. But businesses don't count on the open source projects themselves, they count on intermediary companies, like Red Hat, to provide service, support, updates, and enhancements to their own products as well as the open source ones they ship. Thats why Red Hat employees get paid to contribute to open source projects.

    There are some really great articles out there about the business side of open source. I suggest everyone reading this thread should go read some before they start jumping to conclusions.

  8. #38
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    Quote Originally Posted by kermit
    xerath mentioned not being able to see a single advantage to using it - My personal favourite advantage of using Linux over Windows, is that Windows does not ship with the Bash shell. I know you can get that for Windows, but it just does not seem as seamless as with a UNIX variant such as Linux or one of the BSDs. I feel lost without a shell.
    yes, windows lacks serious command line utilities!
    but that's really a very simple and acessible download
    I use Cygwin, with the Cygwin\bin\ dir mapped on the PATH var, which turns out to be rather nice.

  9. #39
    Pursuing knowledge confuted's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by xErath
    yes, windows lacks serious command line utilities!
    but that's really a very simple and acessible download
    I use Cygwin, with the Cygwin\bin\ dir mapped on the PATH var, which turns out to be rather nice.
    So to get around the inadequacies of Windows you use ... UNIX. That's one of the reasons I switched to Linux after yearrs of Windows/DOS. Entirely too often, I found myself trying to work around something that Windows prevented me from doing, which often involved downloading questionable software to hack up the operating system to add a feature or configure something. I also found myself rebooting far too often (once a week or more often with Windows; in comparison, my computer now only gets rebooted if I turn it off for a thunderstorm), and I found too many programs that conflicted with each other so that they would either not work, or worse, make the operating system unstable. When I had to reinstall Windows to run the two minute install program for my cable modem (dumb system; the modem requires your MAC and needs to be programmed, which can only be done through that program), and consequently lost my MBR, GRUB, and got my partition tables corrupted (WHY?!?!), all of which took me a week of nights after work to fix, I vowed to never go back to Windows. I had stopped using it a few months earlier, but that incident caused me to completely format the Windows partition as ext3. I haven't looked back.
    Away.

  10. #40
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    I use windows. Why? Games! Windows is THE gaming OS.

    Seeing as how I have never used Linux however...I honestly don't have much to say about it's security. I don't have a firewall, or spyware blocker. I scan for viruses, haven't found any on this comp ever. Same with spyware and all that junk. Also, windows itself has never crashed, nothing beyond a ctrl+alt+delete. Windows doesn't seem that vulnerable to me, so it shouldn't be much worse for the average user who doesn't download pr0n from p2p.

  11. #41
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    Quote Originally Posted by confuted
    So to get around the inadequacies of Windows you use ... UNIX.
    inadequacies ? My Os is windows. some tools aren't a OS itself. Plus I only use make, gcc, wget and some other known commands. For me its enough.
    Again I don't see a advantae in chaging Os, I those command utils aren't for me any reason. Plus.. I use too much software, and most of it isn't ported for *nix

  12. #42
    Pursuing knowledge confuted's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Glirk Dient
    I use windows. Why? Games! Windows is THE gaming OS.
    When Max Payne wouldn't make it through the install process on my computer under Windows without segfaulting, I tried it with Wine. Not only did it install, but it also ran nearly perfectly.
    Away.

  13. #43
    Banned nickname_changed's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by confuted
    Entirely too often, I found myself trying to work around something that Windows prevented me from doing, which often involved downloading questionable software to hack up the operating system to add a feature or configure something.
    What were you trying to achieve?
    Quote Originally Posted by confuted
    I also found myself rebooting far too often (once a week or more often with Windows; in comparison, my computer now only gets rebooted if I turn it off for a thunderstorm)
    My XP SP2 machine has been running for 2.5 months now, and I'm running Visual Studio 2005 beta along with a host of other beta applications (so not the most stable system). My Windows Server 2003 box has been up for 8 months.

    Now I'm sure someone will come and say they have a *NIX box that's been running since WW2 without a single error or shutdown, with CPU and disk usage at a constant 100%. I don't really care - my point is if you're not stuffing around or using bad hardware or drivers, Windows is actually pretty stable.

  14. #44
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    Quote Originally Posted by confuted
    When Max Payne wouldn't make it through the install process on my computer under Windows without segfaulting, I tried it with Wine. Not only did it install, but it also ran nearly perfectly.
    hey.. is wine that good ? I though it only suported a bit of the win api. I'll have to try it some day

  15. #45
    Registered User major_small's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by sean_mackrory
    if that's the one where he gets the virus, then congratulations on beating me to the linkage :P

    on the topic of "more software is made for windows"--IMO, that's a completely unrelated topic--when that matters is when people are designing an overall system for a company. for example, when the Point of Sale systems were designed for my company, they used a linux base. we work with fuji machines wich run on a windows base. both are highly specialized systems, and both do the job they were intended to do (nether very well, but that's not the fault of the OS). both systems are very vulnerable because there's nothing to compromise on our end. the server in the central office, however, is (supposedly) much more closely guarded. I don't know that it's ever come under attack though, because there's not much useful information there either... (unless you're looking for names/phone numbers with ALOT of garbage data due to our laziness)

    TLDR version: the operating system doesn't really matter--IMO, instead of special cases, it should be transparent to the end user, and either way without somebody responsible for keeping it up, security will crumble.

    and on installing: gentoo's emerge. :P
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