[peatmoss]

I think this line was meant mainly to refer to his closed source iPhone, OS X, and Windows use. Perhaps he means his Linux usage is one of the more mainstream distributions that readily facilitates installation of binary kernel blobs (e.g. wifi, video), or 3rd party closed source software.

He may also be calling Linux insecure due to it being less uncompromisingly about security. Same could be said about FreeBSD--they aren't necessarily insecure, but they are not as explicitly focussed on that.

OpenBSD invests a great deal here. They have their own fork of Xorg (or was that XFree86?) that runs not as root. As far as I know that's unique amongst libre *nixen.

EDIT: this is what I get for starting a response, getting coffee and resuming my reply. We don't have to speculate what the author of is post intended, and his response is better than mine ;-)

[creshal]

> OpenBSD invests a great deal here. They have their own fork of Xorg (or was that XFree86?) that runs not as root. As far as I know that's unique amongst libre *nixen.

It's a standard feature of Xorg nowadays, but it's only a feature of vanilla Xorg for a few years.

[Santosh83]

I'm probably misunderstanding something but on my system (Ubuntu 14.04 LTS) the X server runs as root & not as my user.

[creshal]

Ubuntu does not enable it by default, as it mixes poorly with some drivers: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/X/Rootless

AMD only added KMS to their proprietary driver last year, and Nvidia this year (and IIRC only in a beta driver so far); and systemd makes the permission handling a lot easier. So Ubuntu will transition to it eventually, but didn't have all puzzle pieces until too recently for even 16.04 LTS.