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by abhinavk 636 days ago
Why isn't the firewall on by default on desktop systems?
3 comments

It is ? At least on Fedora Workstation for example, Firewall (controlled by firewalld) is installed and enabled by default.
Bear in mind that the default FedoraWorkstation firewalld policy does not protect TCP/UDP ports >= 1025.

Fortunately, in this case, cups-browsed uses port 631/udp :)

Because you don't need a firewall on a sensibly configured desktop computer.

If you have daemons that listen to incoming connections, you only want to run them if they are sane and secure.

A firewall makes sense when you don't trust the daemons in your lair, eh, network, and you don't have the possibility to replace insecure stuff with secure stuff. But a firewall must be maintained by experts.

For a single computer it is much easier: just make sure it is secure and don't add an extra layer of complexity to it.

That attitude was popular in the 90s but any definition of “sensibly configured” in this century involves a firewall.

The reason is that even experts make mistakes, get busy, or rely on assumptions which turn out to be incorrect. For example, you thought your service which uses strong authentication and encryption was safe to expose – and then Heartbleed or RegreSSHion happened. If you restricted ingress, you slept calmly. If you had it open, you had an emergency rush to patch and look for signs of compromise.

It is on Ubuntu last I checked.