Quote:
Originally Posted by Sporkman
I'll second that. No more need for firewalls, antivirus tools, defragging, and all that other BS you need with windows machines. Plus it's free, and it works well on older hardware that can't run bloated & inefficient windows.
...or, if you're made of money, Macs are pretty nice too, and MacOSX shares the same benefits as Linux in terms of security.
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Yeah, I basically agree, but due to my general interest in the field, I hope you don't mind if I nit-pick on some of the finer details.
So, just for the sake conversation anyway, I'd like to point out that firewalls are still a very big deal, regardless of OS. However, while firewalls can become an entire topic unto itself, the basic reason why we don't see firewall applications in *nix like the way we do in Windows is because many free and powerful packet filtering applications already exist. It's just a matter of installing and configuring it. In fact, some enterprise-level hardware firewalls out there use exactly this combination of OS and software....
As for defragging, I must admit that NTFS (Window's latest file system) has reached parity with common *nix file systems. That is, both are now capable of automatically micro-defragging on the fly, which in practice is said to be "good enough".
Anti-virus is an interesting topic. A lot of "techies" don't use them, and truth is, neither do I. There are simply better solutions out there (but is likely more invasive to your system, and may require more time and knowledge to implement). While *nix have their share of malware, they are indeed a smaller target, the user base is generally more technically savvy, and there are less vulnerabilities to the system IMO. However, I think this will probably hold true with more BSD than with Linux, with notable exceptions such as SELinux.
That said, I have to give credit where credit is due, and Microsoft's Trustworthy Initiative is very admirable indeed. Still, while they've plugged up a lot of of holes, but I think real, practical security is going to have to start from the ground up, with correctness in coding in mind. That's something that I don't think Windows will ever achieve unless they restart from scratch....
By now, you can probably tell that I am a BSD snob.
However, as a former Mac user and still a fan to some extent, I agree it's safe to say that OSX is, by far, the most user-friendly version of BSD out there. For non-techies with money to burn, that's what I recommend. For non-technies looking for freebies, Linux is the better way. If you care about security more than you care about user-friendliness, then I personally prefer BSD....