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Cake day: July 26th, 2023

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  • Malware sadly is a problem everywhere, but it is arguably less so on Linux. First, Linux is less popular so less malware is written for it to some degree. That doesn’t mean no malware, but if you’re trying to pwn people hitting a website you’ll get more targetting windows, android, or iOS than Linux so it’s a little less prevalent.

    Second, it could be argued the security model of Linux is more secure than windows. This is a far more contentious point, but I think that simply from having more eyes on the code Linux has a more secure model. Windows relies on security through obscurity a great deal, and if you talk to cybersecurity experts they will often tell you this is no security at all.

    Lastly, because software on Linux is typically installed through centralized repositories of binaries or sandboxed app images, you have to go more out of your way to get dodgy software on Linux. The tradeoff there is that a lot of proprietary apps and helper programs that come with some tech will never be available in the repos and that can send some new users to try finding them elsewhere with all the risks that entails. Some distros go for a middle ground with access to things like the Arch User Repositories, but Ubuntu’s solution is using things like PPA’s to add extra software repositories.



  • Just as an addendum to your answer. In the command writing to mullvad.list the | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mullvad.list is using two helpful linux utilities to modify the command. The first is the | which is called a pipe and connects the text output of one program to the text input of another. The pipe is connecting the output of echo which simply prints a string, in this case composed of the outputs of several other commands to the program tee. Tee which is given admin privileges by the sudo takes an input stream and splits it between two files. In this case those are mullvad.list and since no other was provided stdout the output pipeline of the terminal running the command.

    EDIT:

    In the interest of further completeness. Another utility used in those commands is the command substitution operator of sh. So when the terminal is interpretting text $(some command) gets substituted out for the text output by the command in the parentheses. It is another common way of connecting commands on the shell to allow for more flexible and powerful commands.