With the recent windows 10 EoL news, I was able to move my dad over to Linux mint. But he does a lot of finance stuff. Long ago, Linux had a belief that desktop Linux are not the primary target for crackers but I don’t believe that true anymore since it’s getting significantly popular lately like Europe government migration over to Linux and Libreoffice.

My question would be , given my dad is just as careful on Linux as he has been on windows, would it be fine to do finance like banking and trading (not the fastest kind )?

If not, what would be your distro of choice for that? Even browsers (I installed Firefox and Edge from Microsoft website deb file)

  • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
    31·
    3 days ago

    I think most Linux distros will be fine. As of today desktop marketshare is still small, the governments mostly work within custom business applications. And to this date Linux malware and viruses for the desktop are practically unheard of. The common attacks are against the browsers, not the underlying operating system (so do timely updates and install an adblocker) or we’d expect phishing or phone scams and that’s against the human in front of the computer, again not the operating system. That makes me say they’re about all alright. Of course they’re not all equal. Immutable distros and sandboxing will help here. But the real deal is other countermeasures, like be aware how phishing works and try not to mix online banking and pirating games from shady websites. That belongs on separate user accounts or even installed operating systems. And use password managers, 2 factor authentication and these things. (And don’t use Edge, or some browser from some random third-party repository.)

    • rhabarba@feddit.org
      32·
      3 days ago

      And to this date Linux malware and viruses for the desktop are practically unheard of.

      This is dangerously false.

      edit: I’m sorry to see I have disturbed a few people here, downvoting the truth without a comment. Explains a lot of contemporary politics, I think.

      • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
        2·
        3 days ago

        Can I get some list or a reference to educate myself? As far as I know it still holds true. There’s rootkits, a lot of old stuff and exploits of webservers or embedded devices, supply chain attacks towards developers and the one day the Mint ISO file got compromised. But I’m completely unaware of desktop computer malware with high risk or actually spreading?! And the list on Wikipedia seems to confirm what i said…

        • rhabarba@feddit.org
          03·
          3 days ago

          Okay, let’s assume for fun that there’s highly developed Linux malware that exclusively infects servers and leaves desktops alone. What exactly is a server? Is it a server as soon as a web server service is running? A DNS service? An SMTP service? Some of these are also included with Linux desktops.

          But that’s not the point. There’s no specific “Linux server malware”. There’s Linux malware. It targets the Linux kernel (current data point), not any web stuff.

          • hendrik@palaver.p3x.deEnglish
            1·
            3 days ago

            For example it’s something that has an Apache webserver installed and that Apache is accessible from outside… So the Apache exploit can do something. Do you have both conditions met on your laptop/desktop computer? I’m pretty sure that won’t be the case, and that’s the difference here. And yes, that’s specific.

            • rhabarba@feddit.org
              01·
              3 days ago

              Let me repeat my last paragraph, as you seem to have stopped reading after the first question mark:

              But that’s not the point. There’s no specific “Linux server malware”. There’s Linux malware.

      • Señor Mono@feddit.org
        1·
        2 days ago

        I guess the problem is not “the truth” but a claim without sources combined with a short communication style for a really complex matter.

        Even the link you posted just reports of one malware instead of the current state or perception of the problem. Like a general threat assessment instead of one incident.