Hi there,
Win10 is soon not supported. Tbh Linux have been on my radar since I started to break from the US big tech.
But how is security handled in Linux? Linux is pretty open-source, or am I not understanding it correctly. So how can I as a new user make sure to have the most secure machine as possible?
Since I was referring to win10 losing support I thought it was understood that I asked about security updates like windows does. But to specify, how is the ongoing security updates working on Linux? Who does it? Is it even being done? It is an assumption on my side that the security is done in the same manner like win and mac, with continuous updates but that might as well be a wrong assumption.
Security updates are provided by each package maintainer and released on their own schedule. Microsoft releases updates monthly on Patch Tuesday, unless there’s a severe vulnerability that can’t wait. But since Linux is a bunch of different packages rolled into a distro, there’s no one authority managing updates.
So, this means you might get them faster, or if a maintainer is not engaged, slower. Or, if a package is abandoned, not at all. Distros generally make sure their provided packages are maintained, but updates to third-party packages are not guaranteed.
It’s kind of like Windows. You just hit that shiny “Update” button and boom, your software’s up to date and more secure. Depending on your Linux distro and setup, you might not even need to reboot, which is pretty cool.
Under the hood, most distros don’t really separate security updates from regular ones for everyday apps like your browser. They just roll them all together. But for the kernel, the super deep-core part of the system, sometimes you get security fixes without any new features. That helps keep things stable and safe.
it’s similar. in a mainstream distribution with a desktop environment, updates can typically be configured to notify you or install automatically. it’s common for those updates to now also include third-party sources like flathub.
upgrades (to a next point release or major version) are different, some can be fairly straightforward–others, not so much. and those upgrades will be more frequent, as the “lifecycle” for most linux distributions is shorter than windows’ 10 years.
There are also rolling release distros that never need upgrades. You install the system once and normal updates are all it needs.