I came across this article with a list of privacy and security focused linux distros.
Anybody have some experience with one ore more of these?
Thank you for pointing that out. I missed that. That’s what you get when posting something during the lunchbreak. (Eating and posting sometimes don’t go together all that well 
).
I thought that maybe somebody here could benefit from the article.
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Kali, Parrot and Black Arch are pentesting distros, they’re not designed to be a daily driver or host your personal files so security/privacy there is an after though. They can have sandboxing/VM software out of the box but it’s intended for pentesting/analysis.
Qubes OS isn’t compatible with any of my hardware or i’d be using it. It’s by miles the most secure out of the box. It’s based on Xen instead of KVM for virtualization which i’m not super hot about but it’s all around pretty excellent imho.
I haven’t used Tails much but it’s intended to be a throw-away OS. It’s hard for me to use even as a throw-away VM because of how locked down it is. Whonix is another good one similar to Tails.
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Didn’t read the article because it wanted me to enable ads or create an account to view it. For a site called Linux Security and an article about privacy… that seems disingenuous at best.
On Firefox tick on reader mode and enjoy the article. This great tip was also mentioned recently on the forum.
The site works fine without javascript enabled.
Once you allow their cloudflare javascript through, that’s where the nag screen comes from.
They also have Facebook, Like button and Google tag manager trackers. Typical for a fluff piece.
Who’s the target for this article? None of these distros should be recommended for new users to Linux, it would be a sour experience for someone coming from Mac or Windows.
For privacy, the OS is just one component. Security and privacy are both best done in layers.
If you allow scripts to run (this site being a shining example) - this is where the largest amount of user tracking comes from!
Then, your choice of browser is another component. A browser made by the world’s biggest ad agency (Google) is probably the worst choice for privacy.
Your browsing habits are another component. If you stay signed into everything and don’t use containers (apparently the latest version of Firefox has containerization by default), those websites can slurp and share your cookies with “partners” to profile your browsing habits.
so on and so on.
If you want real privacy and security, use whatever distro you want and keep it up to date, make use of firewalls and figure out how available security features work, then consider your web browsing habits, which imo, is more important than what OS you’re using. Any Linux distro is going to immediately be more private without the built-in black box telemetry that Microsoft and Apple do.
PS. If your choice of distro offers telemetry as being opt-in, consider doing it to help out the distro devs. The opt-ins usually offer a means of seeing what they collect. This is what telemetry SHOULD be used for!
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I agree on this. It is like those ten best movies on Netflix articles.