[gf000]

Freedom to get a stroke from an incomplete toy OS?

Snark aside, desktop Linux userspace (or gnu Linux, call it how you want) is nowhere near production ready. And even for the more general point, giving out root willy-nilly is not more freedom. It's more like letting your child play on the 5th floor of a half-constructed building that's about to be exploded. Your kid can enjoy their time just as much in the safe forest trail.

[d3Xt3r]

Not everything needs to be "production ready". And giving out root willy-nilly is freedom. It's my device, I should get to decide how I want to use it and not have artificial restrictions put on my be by someone else. If I want to rm -rf /, I should be able to do just that.

[gf000]

You can, but maybe don't make it an easy to accidentally invoke default.

Like even `rm` added a flag to not do that without explicitly asking.

Also, there are plenty of immutable OSs now among Linux distros, are they also limiting your freedom?

[akimbostrawman]

>there are plenty of immutable OSs now among Linux distros, are they also limiting your freedom?

By definition they very much can. For example SteamOS wipes all non system application (except flatpaks) on updates unless you disable read only mode.

I use and enjoy GrapheneOS but there is no question that the security comes with the trade off of freedom.

It's up to the user to decide if they prioritize one over the other for there use cases. I take GrapheneOS for mobile because of it's security and GNU/Linux on desktop for its freedom.

[gf000]

What about Fedora?

Good security is about allowing everything you might want to do, but limiting what you don't want happening. Of course it's easier to just put up our hands and don't care about it, but I think we should strive for better security as we are no longer running 3 hand-started processes in a terminal, but 10s of thousands of unknown ones. Even if the processes themselves are trusted, they can easily have vulnerabilities that paired with malicious data can cause real harm. We are just lucky that desktop linux is not a popular target.

Also, I don't think a dead man’s switch on a lawn mower has reasonably limited anyone’s freedom, but it probably saved a few arms and legs.

[akimbostrawman]

>What about Fedora?

You still have sudo don't you? So still less secure but also more freedom than GOS.

>We are just lucky that desktop linux is not a popular target.

Its not only that. The fact that software is expected to be mostly installed and updated from trusted, vetted and signed repositories instead of google or root not being used willy nilly by all applications. Both of these basic usage differences are the reason why for all its security features windows will still be much less secure for the average user than even the most basic linux distro. 90% of security is low hanging fruit.

>I don't think a dead man’s switch on a lawn mower has reasonably limited anyone’s freedom

I'm very sure there have been not a small number of cases where such switches did limit freedom, even if you think they do more good than bad they are still there to limit something. The switch could prevent usage when faulty or otherwise prevent unofficial uses or just repairability.

[gf000]

> Its not only that. The fact that software is expected to be mostly installed and updated from trusted, vetted and signed repositories instead of google or root not being used willy nilly by all applications. Both of these basic usage differences are the reason why for all its security features windows will still be much less secure for the average user than even the most basic linux distro. 90% of security is low hanging fruit.

Well, don't be overly sure about how trustworthy these repositories are. Maintainers can't read all the 100s of millions of lines of code, and as mentioned, faulty programs can be just as bad when combined with non-trustworthy data.

Also, people often run random shell scripts (curl | sh), or npm install stuff -- this is arbitrary code execution with the users's full rights.

> 90% of security is low hanging fruit.

I agree here, but unfortunately still nothing is being done, with the exception of flatpak perhaps? And as for windows, among desktop OSs osx is in the best place in terms of security and even that is pretty behind compared to mobile OSs.

[lucb1e]

> giving out root willy-nilly is not more freedom. It's more like letting your child play on the 5th floor of a half-constructed building that's about to be exploded

I take it you don't use desktop OSes anymore of any kind and call child support whenever you see a parent letting their kid use one? Better protect them from themselves in case they can't handle sudo / UAC prompts and give access (xkcd.com/1200) to the wrong process

This sort of logic really boggles my mind to see on hacker news