this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2024
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Linux about to pop off
This year will definitely be Linux's big break!
Well, it hit 4% on desktop for the first time this year.
1 year ago, Steam Deck already accounted for upwards of 25% of Steam Linux users.
I don't currently have the data to back it up, but I'm pretty fucking convinced it's actually "The Year of the Linux Portable Game System" and not "The Year of the Linux Desktop."
Then think about what that means.
What is holding back users to switch to Linux? Games. For everything else a normal, slightly tech savvy user would want, there's Linux alternatives. Games are the only deal breaker. If the steam deck forces/encourages game publishers to support Linux, that's also a good thing for desktop usage.
Oh, I think it means great things, but I'm just pointing out that more people are switching to Linux for gaming than they are moving to Linux for a desktop. I think that will translate into more people being willing to try it as a desktop experience, 100% agreed.
Naa, fam. We have to fight over it. We're on the Internet, after all.
same as how it "popped off" when Windows XP got discontinued?
Y’all need to let it go. Linux is already mainstream, they just don’t advertise as much. Or, at all.
Windows Vista didn't make many PCs obsolete, though.
when XP was about to stop receiving support in 2014 (and thus becoming obsolete with no upgrade path), people online were all kinds of excited about owners of all those old PCs moving to Linux.
Hope not
I mean, I don't agree, but I can see negative knock-on effects of Linux getting more popular... like more viruses and malware being developed for Linux and Linux noobs getting widely infected because Linux kind of requires you to know enough about your own system to secure it yourself while Microsoft does a lot of the security for you out of the box.
In my experience, UFW isn't enabled out-of-the-box. Windows has a default Firewall enabled out of the box.
So yeah, unless Linux is quickly made a lot more user-friendly in terms of security, the growth in Linux can be seen as a bad thing.
Right. 😂 Considering how badly designed Windows security is, I guarantee you that pretty much any Linux defaults should be better.
Microsoft has to do a lot of extra stuff because the security is so bad. The simplest example is that you can't run Windows without antivirus and firewall, you can with Linux.
It's really nowhere near as bad as it used to be. Windows Defender is more than enough antivirus for any user not downloading shady pirate shit, and it's secure enough for businesses.
A security solution that works by letting the malware in and then maybe catching it is a terrible solution.
That's literally only because there isn't large enough marketshare of Linux to make it worth designing viruses and malware that targets Linux...
As Linux marketshare increases that will change but I guess that point went right over your head.
I really don't think you understand what you're leaving open when you expect a user to be a full-on administrator while connected to the internet and they know fuck-all about networking.
But Linux has a huge market share on servers. If it were possible for viruses and malware to affect it, they would have done so by now. Servers are a much more valuable target for malware anyway since they run on powerful hardware and have access to good connections and lots of interesting data.
Linux systems aren't as prone to remote exploits, their software is more up to date, and it's much harder to execute code on them.
Viruses and malware do effect linux servers. It's not tough to do a search for CVEs on this stuff.
At my job we've got a red mark on an audit because of some dev's pet Linux server was vulnerable to multiple critical CVEs. Thankfully it was isolated from the rest of our network due to being a dev's pet project and not something we were officially supporting.
Linux may be more secure, but there's no magic button for any OS to be perfectly protected against malware if you aren't taking proper steps to protect it.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-malware-attacks-are-on-the-rise-and-businesses-arent-ready-for-it/
https://www.vmware.com/learn/security/exposing-malware-in-multi-cloud.html
It's literally marketshare. Linux isn't by default more hardened. It can be more hardened by a professional who understands security, but it's still at risk for all the same things Windows servers are, especially Social Engineering. Humans are almost always the weakest link in the security chain. Further, security researchers are literally seeing an increase in attacks on Linux-based servers.
But sure, I guess we couldn't trust the research of VMware or anything. Please get out of here with this outright misinformation.
Marketshare? For desktops sure, but servers? The internet is made of Linux servers.
Oh and lots routers, switches, hotspots, smart things, all kind of little things.
Drop in the bucket compared to Windows. Great, they found 3 pieces of malware that target Linux, 2 years ago. Lol.
Meanwhile there are dozens of Windows malware coming out every day, botnets are running hundreds of thousands to millions of compromised Windows systems, and ransomware is rampant on Windows.
Yeah, because botnets are made from consumer-level machines that are badly secured.
So some idiot who knows nothing about Linux sets it up the first time, never create an account other than the root account, never enabled UFW, and browses all day is literally the kind of people who make botnets are looking for to target. They don't target Linux for these because it's such a small market share in the consumer-desktop market.
Corporate servers tend to actually have competent security people running them, which is why you don't see constant breaches of Linux servers, although it happens. Even then, corporate servers can be hacked if the services running on them aren't appropriately patched. The Equifax hack is a great example of this, a series of cascading failures, and the CVE relating to it touched on that it was an Apache exploit that could work in either Windows or Linux.
https://isc.sans.edu/diary/22169
Pro-tip: Cybersecurity is hard, and expecting random asshats who've never had any training figure out on the go is asking for a bad time.