So, although we had Macs also before Windows got popular, a Mac back then (even today for new models) is way out of price range as a home machine - so when Windows first arrived and games started to appear on the PC, it was a godsend because finally - someone had gotten around to making a GUI like Apples, but made it on a platform that had games - games with graphics and sound like the arcade quality.

True, there were other machines around that were doing that kind of thing very successfully (eg - Atari ST, Amiga 500). But the difference with what the IBM-compatible did was it made your parents pay for a computer because it looked like a serious office machine that you could do non-gaming things with. Whereas the Ataris and the Amigas came out of the home computer for games and hobbies area.

Wanting to know how to be a hacker or a programmer, was a different thing entirely to actually getting your head around it. I was an arts subject major, except in some key areas in science, and to be honest - subjects like computing and maths are not taught in ways that make sense to an arts mind. It wasn’t until I got interested seriously in what the universe actually is, and got into ‘practical shamanism’ that the hard sciences really started to make any sense to me.

So, to get back to the OS discussions - yes, what Linux needs to do in terms of wooing customers over, is be as user-friendly as Macs and Windows. There’s a lot of games on Linux already but they aren’t for the most part the games that people pay big money to play on their Windows PCs (and they also pay big money on their hardware too). At the end of the day they’ll attract people over because the OS is free or substantially cheaper.

Folks that like to tweak with the inner workings of computers are a different load of folks - in the same way that car customisers are a different set of folks than the majority who just want a car that works and gets decent mileage.

*nix is always going to be the systems admin and security choice - a lot of the Apple and Windows server packs look rather attractive, and are more for (other than sleek tech look when it comes to Macs, and the possibility that Itaniums may be more secure via their obscurity - a lot of x86 tricks need rewritten to work on them) admins that work more on a ‘learn the GUI, point and click’ basis - ie, they keep networks running but aren’t necessarily interested in knowing what’s going on in the background.
Nowt wrong with that, I just mean to highlight an area in running networks that is again a different approach to the really techie side of it.
It’s a kind of middle-tier in IT and it’s been about for a good while, and it’s going to keep growing as Microsoft certs stay popular, and HPC vendors move more into providing servers and datacenters preconfigured, with easy GUI set-up wizards.
And of course the *nix (and other more specialised OSs) is still needed behind and in support of all that.

Anyway - the main gist here was that I don’t want to see Linux getting a backlash from consumers when they discover that its security features are more from a systems admin POV. It’s not that as a consumer-targeted OS it’s insecure, it’s just that serious hackers know about Linux, and off-the-shelf folks tend not to, so they’re still open to exploits and they aren’t going to be wanting to go changing code so that inbuilt root accounts and so forth are disabled.
Cause in all honesty, there’ll be folks running a Linux distro who are as open to their OS being compromised as they were on a Windows 95 desktop password.

Also, as fast internet links become more available, a system crash and reinstall @ home isn’t that big a deal anymore: as long as you have apps and OSs on installs of some kind, and have your files on a separate hdd, and have your browser prefs and saves saved, that you’d need to load the OS on again is only going to take less than an hour.

Check your bank accounts credits and debits regularly, and get an application that shows exactly what bandwidth you’re getting online, what’s it being used for, what ports / connections are on, and shows what your system resources are being used on. It won’t catch the ones that know how to hide or do even more sophisticated stuff, but it’ll show up if your resources are running on any botnets - may even prevent it if they have to hide during detection, to keep a systems resources app running in the background.

It’s the plastic money society that’s the problem; people leaving their card details online and relying on easy payments, when the banks could have stuck with their freely available magnetic strip cheque clearing systems. They just keep moving to less secure systems; the chip & pin is less secure than the previous system, and the previous system was already insecure to an alarming degree.

As an example of how people are encouraged to put themselves at needless risk - I had a free e-mail that changed its good settings to some javascript based nonsense that corrupted my browser, rendering it useless to me. I had it associated to my ebay account, so I wanted to change that to a different e-mail. They insisted that I put my card on their database, and that I wasn’t able to remove it (I always remove my payment details from anyplace I purchase online right after the purchase, or I change them to a non-working version, so they can’t be skimmed or worse) - just to change my e-mail. So, for some years now I haven’t been able to use ebay, cause there’s no way I’d leave my card details online.

Compatibility is a paradigm and a state of mind for Mac users, especially if they have switched from Windows. The problem with the idea of compatibility is that one associates the Mac with Windows and how applications they once used in Windows cannot be run on Mac. The paradigm shift is when the Mac user realizes that it isn’t about the applications that do not work in Windows, it is about the applications on Mac that have a similar end result as with the Windows applications. For me, having switched to Linux a while ago, but more recently using the Mac OS, I have found that I can do anything and more than that of my Windows OS days of use.

Backtrack is Linux live-cd. Wireshark is an application.

@Patagruel

Great points. Another thing that I would like to add is cost and the amount of computer knowledge a person has. Mac users have one of the easiest OSs to operate and as a result are not faced with many problems. Why don’t more people have macs? Answer is compatibility issues (slowly going away now) and cost. In regards to Linux, this operating system can be one of the best out there in both cost and reliability, only problem is the user needs to know the basic commands (although Ubuntu seems to be in the early stages of changing this).

For people that don’t wanna read the paragraph above, PCs are cheap, and easy to use but are unreliable, Macs are expensive, easy to use, but are very reliable and the Linux OS is free, somewhat hard to get used to, and very reliable.

Most “hackers” that I see on the internet are script kiddies who simply run some exe or AIO CD that a hacker is created to hack website/computer. I am in total agreement with you in the point that linux has more tools and is overall a better system for hacking (take BackTrack or WireShark for an example). In my rebuttal I would like to say it is a good OS but not one of the best.

@ goodpeople

Guilty as charged =P
Great descriptions.

Ofcourse! You always have to use the right/best tool for the job. No argument there. I also (ab)use them all if I have to. But given the choice, I’d prefer the Linux version.

@Sir Henry,

I believe I once mentioned here that I also give lectures and demonstrations. It’s always fun to do a lecture for some usergroup and use MetaSploit to open a remote shell on a Windows-box that runs in a virtual environment on my laptop. MetaSploit is ideal for demonstrations.
When I’m invited to speak, I usually warn them to put me up last, because when I’m done, people tend to run home to secure their networks…

ROFL

No flame war inteded. I use all the below mentioned ones, each for their own unique reason/specific charateristics and for all of them it’s a love and hate relationship. I sincerely believe there is no ‘the one OS’ just some OS which tends to be just a tadd smarter/versatile.

We have had plenty of Mac (ab)users who react in an Windows user fashion simply because some of them firmly believe it to be a superior OS for users more intelligent than those poor Windows adepts rendering them ‘immune’ from the simple user induced mistakes bringing an OS to a grinding halt.
Windows users on the other hand are quite capable of inducing problems simply because a large amount of them think that, having a Windows machine at home equals knowing the intricate details thus giving them enough ‘rights’ to add registry keys and wreak havoc by editing essential files (…I do this at home and it always/usually work….).
Linux users indeed know that they themselves induced the behavior exhibited by the OS or application and do not bother calling the desk, knowing they will be faced with the response: ‘you should not have meddled with that particular part…’
But it’s a good laugh to reread the helpdesk definition of an OS user.

Regarding sec-tools/app/etc I try not to limit myself to just one ‘holy grail’ appication or OS. Depending on the targeted OS you need the mixed bag of OS and tools to explore all (or nearly all) holes. You never know what favored flavour they hacker has.

Your response is why I come to this site. I am still laughing about your description of the different user types and how accurate they are.

As for Metasploit, I like to think of it as the no-brainer action flick you watch when you want all the action, but do not have to waste any brain cycles in the process.

If there’s something wrong and assistance from the helpdesk is required:
Mac users will say something like “I may have done someting wrong. Can you point me in the right direction?
Windows users blame everyone and everything except themselves and their own computer.
Linux users usually don’t call the helpdesk and fix their own problems.

As far as sec-tools are concerned, I’m in the Linux camp for all the reasons Sir Henry pointed out. (Although I also use MetaSploit).

Although I see some validity in your points regarding OS, I find it hard to believe that PCs (I am assuming this is a reference to Windows) are for hackers above and beyond Linux. I have personally found that the security tools available for Linux are A) more prevalent, B) more robust and C) better. Given, I know that Metasploit is a popular feather for the Windows cap, but I would rather work with something in linux and get a deeper understanding of the mechanics rather than make a few clicks to pwn something. As I have stated before, however, this is merely my opinion.