Madaidan is a security researcher who writes detailed critiques and hardening guides on Linux, Android, and browser security.
Commenters praise its detailed, technical arguments and cite it against the view that Linux is secure by default, including on Flatpak and Firefox.
They make detailed arguments for their position, for example, https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/
The people who think that Linux security is fine also make arguments, but those arguments are much less detailed (and much less convincing IMHO), such as the frequently-made argument that the fact that Linux's source code is readily available at no cost to anyone who wants to search it for security holes means that Linux's security will tend to be better than the security of systems whose source code is held secret. I mean, sure, if that were the only thing we knew about operating systems and we were forced to choose an OS based on that single piece of information, we'd choose one of the open-source ones, but the persuasiveness of that argument is more than cancelled out when we consider all the other things we know, such as the fact that many exploitable vulnerabilities have been found in Linux that examination of old versions of the source code reveal have been present for decades.
>How about the opinion of people who have nothing to win nor lose?
The question is complicated enough that my guess is that basically the only people who make the mental effort to resolve the question are people with a stake in it.
How many people for example who do not have a loved one with the cancer or a unusually high risk for that cancer and who do not hope to advance their careers as cancer-curers or cancer-preventers take the trouble to learn about the diagnosis and treatment of a…
Not really. Even with modern technologies, the Linux desktop technology stack is very, very far behind when it comes to security.
The Linux kernel itself is a very weak foundation security-wise, the only way Android and ChromeOS get away with it is by using a very small feature set and restricting everything else as much as possible with seccomp, SELinux and heavy sandboxing.
The Linux desktop userland doesn't have meaningful hardening features compared to other platforms (even Windows is ahead, sadly). For example, practically all distros use glibc's memory allocator which has both poor performance and security [1] and their toolchain is based on gcc, with no support for modern compiler security features such as CFI (with the sole exception of Chimera Linux). Not to mention the permission model is completely outdated, like in that xkcd cartoon. Flatpak only mitigates this partially, because the Flatpak sandbox is very weak. The people working on Flatpak are doing their best, but from reading some GitHub issues, it's clear they are badly overworked and not security experts. The person responsible for Flatpak's seccomp sandbox has said it isn't even his main responsibility and he doesn't have much knowledge about seccomp and is learning along the way [2]. The Flatpak seccomp filter is based on a denylist rather than an allowlist, and many dangerous syscalls can't be blocked because applications rely on them (e.g. Firefox needs ptrace for the crash reporter). You also have…
All the features that Google ships are necessary for web apps. E.g., open this webpage in different browsers: https://howfuguismybrowser.dev/ — Note that Firefox was once on top of this development, during the days when they also had an interest in developing FirefoxOS. Those days are long gone.
As for what Google has done historically with Chrome, it's trivially easy to point to developments that have improved the web.
You can start with the fact that it's the most secure browser, see for instance: https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.html
You can also read their original marketing material, in which they describe the isolation of plugins, extensions, or tabs, i.e., a crashing Flash movie or a crashing website no longer crashed the browser — then count the years it took for their competition to catch up: https://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/
On “speed”, not sure what you mean, but Chrome has been demonstrably the fastest browser. It always was, with V8 being the fastest JS engine since launch, but also in benchmarks testing more “real” experiences, like Speedometer 3. The only area where it needs improvement is battery efficiency on macOS machines, where Safari has the lead, but even there it made great strides.
Speaking of PWAs, Chrome was also the first to deliver a good PWA experience on mobile devices and on the desktop. For mobile devices, the first one was Apple's Safari, but then Apple crippled the experience by not implementing much…
Rooting is a very bad idea. https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/android.html#rooting But GrapheneOS is fully open source and provides great build instructions, so you can always make your own build and add whatever features or privileged apps you like within the standard AOSP frameworks for privileged apps with system integration.
> Backing up all app data via Neo Backup
GrapheneOS includes Seedvault by default. https://grapheneos.org/features#encrypted-backups
> High-quality call recording via Call Recorder
Call recording is built into the Dialer app on GrapheneOS. https://grapheneos.org/features#encrypted-backups:~:text=Call%20recording%20functionality%20within%20the%20Dialer%20app%20using%20modern%20Android%20storage%20with%20recordings%20stored%20in%20Recordings/Call%20Recordings%20and%20no%20restrictions%20based%20on%20region%20or%20special%20cases%20like%20playing%20a%20recording%20tone%20(users%20are%20still%20responsible%20for%20complying%20with%20their%20local%20laws).
> DNS-based ad blocking is possible via apps like AdGuard
DNS-based blocking can also be accomplished by using Android's native Private DNS feature with a resolver that blocks ads. You could even host your own on a VPS if you are more comfortable running name resolution and DNS-level adblocking on infrastructure you control.
The RethinkDNS app also lets you use DNS-level adblocking and a VPN at the same time. https://grapheneos.org/faq#ad-blocking-apps
> I have no experience with…
I actually have seen this in my current company. Many developers switched browsers away from Firefox. Some even switched to Edge since it plays better with the battery. I know early adopters of Brave from its early years too.
When things get a bit bigger in JIRA, Firefox's JS engine struggles with horrifying amount of JS JIRA throws at it. Same for Google Meet and Zoom.
I tried and realized Firefox has a huge power consumption penalty on my Android phones and a considerable one on my laptop. I still keep it as a secondary but it is still not there yet.
IT people in my both current and previous company prefer deploying Google Chrome. Previous one was a complete Microsoft shop, they didn't use the built-in Edge but removed it and deployed Chrome. There is quite a bit Microsoft sysadmin know-how about Chrome, less for Edge and even less so for Firefox.
If you're privacy-conscious you'd have searched or visited blogs like this[1] or privacyguides.org or privacytools.io. They all point out issues.
They are all a factor. Many people still install Chrome because the apps / websites they visit tell them so. If you used web-based engineering software, they will always recommend Chrome.
Google Docs of course works better on Chrome, intentionally or unintentionally Google will roll out more optimizations for it.
[1] https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/firefox-chromium.html
I'd stick to having a unified vfat boot+EFI partition mounted at /boot. systemd-boot is the simplest bootloader and it doesn't support loading it's config and kernels from non-vfat partitions anyway. Just make a 5GB boot+EFI partition so you can store plenty of kernels or even a recovery image.
For security, I recommend following Madaidan's Insecurities Linux hardening guide, it has good explanations of most of the same sysctl options and kernel flags. [1]
The only option that may be best left disabled is `init_on_free=0` since this is one of the few options that has a measurable performance impact (besides the normal spectre/meltdown related options).
For NTP, systemd-timesyncd works fine and is probably the default for any modern distro.
Desktop security is still a nightmare, if you use a Wayland based desktop environment and Pipewire for audio/video streams then maybe in 10 years you'll a secure clipboard and no unauthorized keyloggers.
[1] https://madaidans-insecurities.github.io/guides/linux-hardening.html