Say a friend is looking for a new system, and said person is not particularly savvy with technology, what system would you point them toward?

  • redsand@infosec.pub
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    20 hours ago

    Mint is not run by professionals. It has been pwnd more than once. It’s pretty, slightly better run than manjaro and has no reason to exist when ubuntu, fedora and suse exist.

    Please stop pointing to mint as a starting place. Every level user is going to get a more secure and reliable experience avoiding mint.

    Ubuntu, fedora, suse and spins of those 3. I wouldn’t put a normal user on anything else without extenuating circumstances.

    • Pelicanen@sopuli.xyz
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      8 hours ago

      From what I can find, the Linux Mint website was breached once, in 2016, for a short duration and during that time the download link for the ISO referred to a site that was hosting a version that installed a backdoor.

      Meaning it was short in scope, the dev team reacted to it, handled it, and then were open and transparent about it, and it only affected people who downloaded the ISO at that exact span in time and also installed that version instead of replacing it when the announcement came.

      The harsh reality of IT security isn’t that it’s a question of if you get hacked, it’s a question of when, even for multi-billion dollar companies.

      • redsand@infosec.pub
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        1 hour ago

        They got hacked a couple times before that though it may not be widely published. Mint originally existed as an “easier” and prettier unbuntu run by volenteers. They would be extremely unlikely to figure out they had been compromised by an APT. And before you say it, look up the 2016 hack, it wasn’t an APT.