Which Linux distros are more SECURE than Windows: (Are SELinux and Wayland enough?)

It’s a lot more complicated than that. There are good reasons for why many security experts still recommend Linux distributions (like Tails and Whonix) for highly targeted individuals. Here’s how I see it:

  • Mac (and to a lesser extent, Windows) have better security features and exploit mitigations, but said companies (Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc) significantly harm or risk the users privacy or security in various ways. Windows in particular is notorious for this. These issues are inherent to proprietary systems which provide “tyrant security”, leaving you more vulnerable to the whims of said companies and their governments.

  • Mac and Windows have well established first and third party anti-malware solutions whereas Linux does not. However, Linux is currently far less likely to be targeted by malware and in many people’s experience it seems to result in far fewer infections than Windows.

  • A competent attacker might have an easier time targeting a standard desktop Linux system rather than a Windows system. But if you are being targeted by a competent attacker, I’d find it hard to believe they’d only have success on Linux and not Windows. Therefore it makes more sense to me to focus on good security practices and use layers of defenses rather than to hope Windows can prevent a compromise. This hypothetical only makes sense to me if your attackers are both incompetent yet familiar with Linux, but this is ultimately my opinion which can’t meaningfully be proven one way or another.

So whether Windows is better than Linux in your situation really depends on who your threats are and how far you’re willing to go to protect yourself from them. I personally think most people in most situations could use Linux (or ideally QubesOS), even if they expect to be targeted. So long as they practice proper security and don’t depend on the protections of their OS alone, they’ll be better off IMO.

Nothing fits neatly on a 2D spectrum and it’s hard to comment further on how suitable they are for you without any more information on your threat model. Unless you want to elaborate, I can only say that they should be more than enough for the average person and if you believe you are being targeted, you’re probably going to want to make use of virtual machines as an extra layer of defence rather than exclusively depend on the protections offered by your host OS.

The developer of Secureblue stated that operating system is for those who want to prioritize security after deciding they want to use Linux, which might imply they believe it may not be “more secure” than Windows. As explained in my rant at the beginning, what’s “more secure” is a complicated topic and not a simple spectrum of more or less secure.

That being said, QubesOS is a whole different beast as it is not a Linux distro but rather a Xen distro. It has been considered on par with or better than Windows/Mac even by critics who consider Linux so horribly unsafe that it must be avoided.

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