One of the main reasons I completely left windows and osx for Linux is the fact that Linux is open source. In an era of mass surveillance, secret court orders ordering companies to build in backdoors into their products, companies building in tracking into their software and so on, I find it irresponsible to use closed source software.

Only my personal opinion though.

Even for open source nobody has time to audit every line of code that runs. Don't forget to audit the compiler too.

Oh and get an electron microscope and audit the CPU :-)

@spl0 or develop and use your own tools... But good point, as Heartbleed demonstrated

I would also argue that diversity, as is also the case in biology, is useful for preventing contagion

But that doesn't matter all that much if you are broadcasting all of your data via cloud storage, online services and the like.

Especially when you get companies like Yahoo giving out the keys to the kingdom in the form of a custom tool *they* wrote for the govt to be able to read and search all emails going through their servers. That's just one example. Other research suggests the US govt actively researches and hordes exploits which they can use to compromise pretty much any system.

It's not so much an issue of trusting the OS on your system ... But all of the providers you use and the people who run your government.

And that is way beyond any OS, closed source or open.

Individuals are quite often worthy of trust. Unfortunately organizations and governments are not.

@maartenwut vm on linux ?

@DarkMukke I thought of that, but I need to use the integrated GPU for the host system in order to redirect the main GPU to the Windows machine (for minimum performance loss when gaming). Also, the motherboard, CPU and GPU needs to support certain standards. An interesting idea I will try some day but right now it seemed like to much hassle.

I think Richard Stallman claimed that Ubuntu was spyware

@maartenwut little late but ye I used photoshop on wine and could even play cod modern warfare in high quality without lag (nvidia with bumblebee drivers)!