> That's only half of what a multi-user system does though. The other half is about fine-grained privilege management.
Useful in a networked corporate environment, a lot less so on a personal computer.
> All of those problems that windows has with random programs being keyloggers are eminently solvable on linux because you can make a custom user that cannot use networking or listen to the keyboard as appropriate, and then launch the process using that user.
You can do that on Windows and have been able to since at least Vista. the only reason I disqualify XP is that I wrote a keylogger for it so I know for a fact that you can grab raw keyboard input from any user session. Even before that though NTFS offered a fine grained access control mechanism for files and folders.
> Desktop linux users tend not to run outgoing firewalls, for example, they just don't allow software that they don't trust to access the network.
My experience is that they just don't run software that wasn't sourced from their distribution's package repositories. That is certainly an advantage of the appstore model, but you have to admit it is significantly more limiting that being able to get the latest version of something by downloading it from the vendor's website.
>My experience is that they just don't run software that wasn't sourced from their distribution's package repositories. That is certainly an advantage of the appstore model, but you have to admit it is significantly more limiting that being able to get the latest version of something by downloading it from the vendor's website.
It would be very limiting if it were reality, yes. I frequently download packages that aren't part of the default distro repo though. There's lots of PPA's, and I also install a lot of software just by extracting it into a directory in my home folder and running it.
Useful in a networked corporate environment, a lot less so on a personal computer.
> All of those problems that windows has with random programs being keyloggers are eminently solvable on linux because you can make a custom user that cannot use networking or listen to the keyboard as appropriate, and then launch the process using that user.
You can do that on Windows and have been able to since at least Vista. the only reason I disqualify XP is that I wrote a keylogger for it so I know for a fact that you can grab raw keyboard input from any user session. Even before that though NTFS offered a fine grained access control mechanism for files and folders.
> Desktop linux users tend not to run outgoing firewalls, for example, they just don't allow software that they don't trust to access the network.
My experience is that they just don't run software that wasn't sourced from their distribution's package repositories. That is certainly an advantage of the appstore model, but you have to admit it is significantly more limiting that being able to get the latest version of something by downloading it from the vendor's website.