Ubuntu blues

[Martin Alderson]

Sorry guys, but this is turned into a flamewar.

I don't have the effort to continue it, but needless to say I feel
that aslong as Linux continues to have this attitude of 'WIND0WZ
SUX0RZZ111LOL', it's not going to address the real issues.

I thought it was very funny that someone commented that Bash was more
familiar than Windows for them. Gee, that's got to be 1% of the
computer-using population.

Also, installation is stil a huge issue on Linux. This needs fixed, and fast.

apt-get is not good enough for the reason it's centralized and _STILL_
requires per-distro packages. This is not good enough - I can run
Win3.1 apps on XP absolutely fine.

Also, as for this 'Linux is more difficult to exploit' stuff, I don't
really believe it to be honest. It doesn't really matter anyway since
the main problem is USER CONSNETED SPYWARE INSTALLS. Please tell me
how Linux is going to stop this? How can you stop someone installing
spyware.deb or whatever when they type their password and press OK -
answer? You can't.

Yes, Windows has its problems, yes, it used to suck and crash all the
time. But Linux has many more problems for the desktop still to
overcome (which are being solved, but I sometimes get frustrated in
the direction of Linux Desktop - thankfully things like HAL are
becoming a top priority which should of happened a long time ago), and
I think GTK2 is still less stable (or harder to write stable apps for)
than Win32 apps.




On Thu, 09 Dec 2004 20:28:37 -0500, Dmitriy Kropivnitskiy
<nigde at mitechki.net> wrote:
> On Fri, 2004-12-10 at 01:09 +0000, Martin Alderson wrote:
> 
> 
> > 1) We will get viruses still. Viruses can very easily live in
> > userspace. Therefore, Linux offers no extra protection. Infact, it
> > probably offers less due to the huge array of programming languages
> > (python, perl, php, bash etc etc) that it offers straight away. This
> > means lots and lots of filetypes to exploit.
> >
> > 2) Spyware, again, is a userspace thing and therefore can very easily
> > happen. I could write you a Firefox extension that you could nistall
> > and it would popup with a random advertiser every 5 seconds.
> 
> I think there is a bit of confusion here. Most Windows worms, spyware
> and viri are user-space programs. As opposed to kernel-space programs
> such as kernel modules. The reason Linux will never have as many
> exploits as Windows is the weak separation of priviliges Windows has.
> Almost anything that has to do something useful runs with administrator
> access, and therefore potentially will yield administrator access to an
> attacker. On a properly configured desktop Linux system, only a few key
> processes run as root and not one of them is actually listening on the
> network (at least not on a public interface) and even out of those half
> is running as a root more by tradition. This is the main reason why
> Linux is more difficult to exploit. Also, by doing senseless integration
> and over-friendliness MS hid from the user a lot of things that user
> actually has to know, weather he/she wants it or not (such as a file
> extension). This is another thing that makes Windows a better platform
> to exploit. Hopefully by the time Linux desktop will start actually
> making it, selinux will become more mature and standard, and it will
> become impossible even for a user process to do anything it was not
> designed to do.
> 
> --
> 
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