With the recent windows 10 EoL news, I was able to move my dad over to Linux mint. But he does a lot of finance stuff. Long ago, Linux had a belief that desktop Linux are not the primary target for crackers but I don’t believe that true anymore since it’s getting significantly popular lately like Europe government migration over to Linux and Libreoffice.
My question would be , given my dad is just as careful on Linux as he has been on windows, would it be fine to do finance like banking and trading (not the fastest kind )?
If not, what would be your distro of choice for that? Even browsers (I installed Firefox and Edge from Microsoft website deb file)
I think most Linux distros will be fine. As of today desktop marketshare is still small, the governments mostly work within custom business applications. And to this date Linux malware and viruses for the desktop are practically unheard of. The common attacks are against the browsers, not the underlying operating system (so do timely updates and install an adblocker) or we’d expect phishing or phone scams and that’s against the human in front of the computer, again not the operating system. That makes me say they’re about all alright. Of course they’re not all equal. Immutable distros and sandboxing will help here. But the real deal is other countermeasures, like be aware how phishing works and try not to mix online banking and pirating games from shady websites. That belongs on separate user accounts or even installed operating systems. And use password managers, 2 factor authentication and these things. (And don’t use Edge, or some browser from some random third-party repository.)
And to this date Linux malware and viruses for the desktop are practically unheard of.
This is dangerously false.
edit: I’m sorry to see I have disturbed a few people here, downvoting the truth without a comment. Explains a lot of contemporary politics, I think.
I guess the problem is not “the truth” but a claim without sources combined with a short communication style for a really complex matter.
Even the link you posted just reports of one malware instead of the current state or perception of the problem. Like a general threat assessment instead of one incident.
Can I get some list or a reference to educate myself? As far as I know it still holds true. There’s rootkits, a lot of old stuff and exploits of webservers or embedded devices, supply chain attacks towards developers and the one day the Mint ISO file got compromised. But I’m completely unaware of desktop computer malware with high risk or actually spreading?! And the list on Wikipedia seems to confirm what i said…
This is dangerously unspecific.
Thank you!
I add this overview article https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/ethical-hacking/what-is-linux-malware/
I don’t think OP’s dad will host a misconfigured cloud service on their computer or set an insecure password, enable ssh and then also open a port in the router. Most attacks on that list are specific to how internet servers are set up. And well, insecure old embedded devices. And we in fact have those systems targeted regularly. My servers gets bombarded with malicious traffic trying to get in.
Based upon your wording, I am assuming your father is not particularly tech savvy, if this is the case first and foremost you should be picking a distro that is maintained by a large group of trustworthy developers, this removes the niche distros from the running. Secondly, since he isn’t going to want to learn the terminal, you should be picking a distro that installs programs with a GUI package manager or flatpak manager, this removes the likes of arch, gentoo, & open suse tumbleweed. Thirdly, you will want a distro that is based on one you understand well enough to run tech support, I don’t know which that is for you, if it is Debian based stick with mint, fedora based go with fedora workstation or fedora KDE, if it is opensuse I don’t have any recommendations sorry.
After you select the distro you need to educate your dad that he should only be getting new programs through the package manager, and I would either tell him the inherit insecurity of some flatpaks or remove flathub from your mirror list unless there is something he really needs in which case you need to do your research.
In general security on Linux is a lot more active for IT than it is for Windows, but for the general user if they can get by using a well known distro’s repos you shouldn’t have any security issues.
If you are overly worried you could add apparmor to the system to isolate the system from programs or pick an immutable distro like bazzite, but in general the immutables are smaller teams which is why I don’t prefer them.
Top choice regarding security? Qubes OS. But that’s not just a distro.
this is the first time knowing the Qubes OS. and upon researching on wikipedia, it’s meant to be used with multiple OSes for different tasks…? wow
It is. the underlying OS is actually a type 1 hypervisor, XEN. better take a look at their official website then wikipedia though.
It essentially is multiple OSes, one host and plethora of separate virtual machines that only communicate what they were designed to communicate.
This way pretty much nothing can get access to userspace.
Secureblue is what I’d use if security was a major concern. Every time I’ve tried to use a non-Ubuntu distro I’ve immediately ran into a few technical issues so I stick with Ubuntu.
Generally I think I’m safe as long as I don’t install untrusted software, and the distro didn’t package untrusted software.
OpenBSD
ducks
I mean… Not wrong
But x11 is insecure
ducks
If you’re picking a distro for someone else I would not recommend a small project distro or something incredibly niche 😅
Any of the big projects should be decent. Fedora, maybe fedora silverblue or whatever their imutable variant is called, opensuse, Mint, Ubuntu, debian. (Personally I don’t like some of the choices Ubuntu makes but it may still be a very good option for less technical folks)
Others can tell you which of those have the best security defaults, but to be honest it doesn’t sound like you actually have particularly exceptional security needs relative to what any distro will provide. I’d prioritize something stable and user friendly- which, again, your best bet is NOT picking a niche small project or something most people have never heard of
Maybe Secureblue?
That also comes with its own hardened browser based on GrapheneOS’s.
And if you don’t go with Secureblue and its browser, I’d recommend using a browser Chromium based, probably Brave. I know that’s a controversial choice, but in terms of security and ad blocking, it’s one of the better options. And disable JIT for V8.
OpenSUSE is big on the security and usability front. None of the services you install activate by themselves. Firewall active by default. The first user doesn’t get access to every group under the sun after installation.
And everything can be controlled through GUI tools. But it doesn’t throw a fit when you’ve done something yourself through the CLI.
Opensuse MicroOS variants kalpa and aeon are probably what they are looking for. Stupid easy to set up and, from what I understand, quite secure.
Downside is that it needs workarounds for some things like Steam Flatpak and such, but that is the nature of atomic distros.
Also SELinux by default now instead of AppArmor. It can be a pain but it works. I.e. files dumped into a SAMBA share aren’t autoshared unless they have the samba SELinux setting applied, etc
