this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2025
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
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Madaidan's Insecurities hasn't been updated in a few years, so some of the information is a bit out of date. It is still decent information, but don't follow it granularly. What you may be looking for instead is secureblue, which essentially does what you are describing but for Fedora Atomic desktops.
From secure blue's website:
Why do they say that? What limitations does Linux have in terms of security?
https://privsec.dev/posts/linux/linux-insecurities/
That's a more up-to-date article about security issues with Linux.
TL;DR is that Linux (the desktop, not the kernel) is fundamentally insecure, and so the more secure options for desktop are Qubes OS (Qubes OS is not a Linux distro) or (even better) GrapheneOS used in Desktop Mode. secureblue is about as secure as Linux can get, but the most secure option for desktop itself.
Things also get weird when you consider running secureblue inside of Qubes OS. See my post for more thoughts about that.
Unless you have an unusual threat model, this statement is utter nonsense. I can run a kconfig stripped kernel with zero kernel modules and one userspace process that is completely audited and trusted, without the ability to spawn even other processes or talk to network (because the kernel lacks support for the IP stack).
Secureblue might offer something significant when compared to other popular and easily usable tools, but if you compare it to the theoretical limit of Linux security, its not even comparable.
I examined Secureblue's kernel parameters and turned multiple of them off because some were mitigations for something that was unnecessary. IE: The kernel would make the analysis that your hardware is not affected by a vulnerability, and thus there is no need to enable a specific mitigation. But they would override this and force the mitigation, so you take a performance hit, for what I understand to be, no security gain. Not sure why they did that, a mistake? Or did they simply not trust the kernel's analysis for some reason? Who knows.
You're right, secureblue isn't quite there when talking about security on desktop/server Linux.