A petition has been created by an Austrian EU rep. to replace Windows with GNU/Linux in all Europe
A petition has been created by an Austrian EU rep. to replace Windows with GNU/Linux in all Europe
Main page of the Petitions Portal. General information, most recently uploaded petitions and further links to procedural pages. Further links to the European Parliament website.
The petition is open to all EU resident. The goal is to replace all Windows in all public institution in Europe with a sovereign GNU/Linux.
If the petition is successful it would be a huge step forward for GNU/Linux adoption.
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My main worry with Linux becoming more popular is that it will be attacked with more malware and viruses. I wouldn't mind though if Linux programmers could come up with better protection.
Linux is a lot easier to secure
Most of the Windows malware gets deployed by some user downloading and executing random files they downloaded on the web. Since installing applications on Linux is usually done through some centralized package manager or app store (Flathub), it almost entirely eliminates this attack vector. Running random scripts from the internet by downloading them using
curland piping them intosudo bashis a whole nother issue though. Noob-friendly distros like Ubuntu should IMO have some safeguards in place to block these actions.They have, snaps
Since installing applications on Linux is usually done through some centralized package manager or app store (Flathub), it almost entirely eliminates this attack vector.
xz moment.
Yes, I see that weasel word "almost" in that sentence. I expect it's going to be doing increasingly heavy lifting as Linux becomes a more lucrative target to attack over time.
Your point generally stands, though. Even if they're fallible, at least someone is vetting it at all somewhere in this pipeline.
Linux is already what a decent chunk of servers run, so I don't really see it increasing malware.
The insecure parts of Linux is mostly on the DE side opposed to the core OS part that servers use. We absolutely will see more vulnerabilities in the future as Linux grows.
What vulnerabilities are you talking about? Linux is pretty solid especially with wayland and flatpaks.
Throw in some other tools like mandatory access controls and you are set
Many developments over the last few years have been for improving those aspects, e.g. Wayland is far more secure than X11 could ever be. There will be more vulnerabilities found, but it won't be as bad as one might fear.
Flatpak too, they could force more filesystem restrictions tho, line Android apps
Well, servers don't generally run Thunderbird and Firefox
Linux-based OSes are less uniform than Windows. They could and probably will be targeted, but exploits won't spread because of how many verities they are and how different and incompatible they can be. Some, for example, don't even use the GNU utils and userland.
This petition is for developing something dubbed "EU-Linux", so if implemented as is will be pretty uniform
That is mostly false. Most of the code that faces the network is the same. As is most of the background running code. Linux is still more secure.