Sovereignty yes it's obviously better.
I am just talking about the pure tech fact that GNU/Linux desktops do not have any meaningful intra-host security boundaries.
Is this a worthwhile tradeoff against being tied to US tech? Yeah maybe, like I said there are no good options here, and Linux might be the least bad.
Genuinely interested: does it bring something to say "everything is crap anyway, but given that we must choose between one of them, we may as well choose the least bad" instead of "the best solution we currently have is X"?
Secondly, are you sure that it is impossible to secure a system for a whole department? I have seen relatively big companies having an IT team managing their own Linux flavour. That is, whitelisting the packages that can be installed by the users. Given that most computer users in the administration use a handful of programs, it doesn't seem super hard to audit them?
> Genuinely interested: does it bring something to say "everything is crap anyway, but given that we must choose between one of them, we may as well choose the least bad" instead of "the best solution we currently have is X"
Well I dunno if that's true, that's why I didn't say it. Linux _may_ be the best solution overall I am not sure. It is definitely not the best solution from a security perspective.
> Secondly, are you sure that it is impossible to secure a system for a whole department? I have seen relatively big companies having an IT team managing their own Linux flavour. That is, whitelisting the packages that can be installed by the users.
Just whitelisting packages isn't enough. ChromeOS effectively does this and their whitelist is extremely small, yet they are still only ok with that because they backed it up with the rest of the pieces needed to make a secure Linux desktop, including a fully vertically integrated stack.
You know what happened at Google after Operation Aurora and they went full bore on security (BeyondCorp and all that)? They started phasing out Windows laptops for employees immediately.
I'm honestly having trouble taking you seriously, Windows has always been at the butt of security jokes, I guess you maybe didn't grow up with winnuke etc? But maybe you could elaborate a bit more concretely about what kind of intra-host security boundaries are missing, and why they would be required on single-user computers in this scenario?
I worked at Google on post-Aurora endpoints security. Windows laptops are alive and well at Google. Linux laptops have had one foot in the grave for a while now (it's a bummer). Google historically made gLinux work only with enormous investments in customised distros and D&R.
> But maybe you could elaborate a bit more concretely about what kind of intra-host security boundaries are missing
- no boundaries between applications, everything runs as $USER which can read your browser creds
- no boundary between user and root, everything can trivially escalate privs (maybe we will fix this post Glasswing, let's see)
- no boundary between boots, root can trivially persist a compromise (probably non-root too)
The tech exists to solve all these problems on Linux, but there isn't a distro that strings it all together. (Unless you count ChromeOS/Android which are not really OSS).