It's patch Tuesday...and...no...I'm not going to rant about what you think.

My news feed showed this today: 5 Ridiculous Windows 10 Headlines That Will Have You Running To Linux

Normally, this would be a joy to see, that more people are switching to Linux and advocating for the open source operating system. I myself have been a serious Linux user since over 10 years ago and I do enjoy how customizable and hassle free it is for me.

However, this article from Forbes is less about the joys of migrating to Linux and more about avoiding patches.

Patches - every system requires updates. It may be to fix issues, address security concerns, or bring out some cool new feature. Systems are programmed by humans and often times, even simple systems can have bugs. Most importantly today is the the fact that security vulnerabilities are found at an exponential rate of growth year over year. Without frequent patches, systems become vulnerable, even Mac and Linux. One example is Intel's recent hardware flaws that could allow for a website to gain elevated privileges using java scripts, which web browsers quickly patched to mitigate. But there is so much we haven't discovered because of one common denominator - humans. Humans are not perfect and was probably never meant to be. To make mistakes is to be human and to learn from these mistakes is how we evolve.

For someone to say that avoiding patches is a great thing to do, I sincerely hope they know what they're doing. I am not a fan of patches, but I do it to stay safe and current on my systems. I use Linux 95% of the time not just because it's flexible and more personal, but also because I'm comfortable with it and I know how to get around problems as they come up through the commandline. I use Windows the other 5% of the time when I edit photos or occasionally play some games. I've also had a couple weeks last year with a Macbook. I can share my honest experience of all three systems, though very limited on MacOS.

Windows

Windows 7 was a major turning point for Microsoft in terms of system stability. Some may say that Windows XP was but let's focus on more recent version of Windows 10. I've jumped on by upgrading my desktop the day it was available for free, knowing the future model of a subscription based Windows OS was likely. I have to say that the OS runs lighter, more stable, and generally faster thanks to a huge amount of code rewrite by Microsoft developers. My system prior to the upgrade was a few years old, accumulated all sorts of programs, yet the upgrade went smooth and I was ready to go the same day. My biggest issue with updates since the beginning of Windows 7 till now was that once or twice, patches fail to apply requiring rollback, causing some frustration that I can't use my computer for a few minutes extra. Otherwise, it's been surprisingly smooth, even on my Core i7 2600K @5Ghz for the last 7 years or so.

Linux

I run Opensuse Tumbleweed. Some people frown upon that when I say it but it works for me as it provides me with a stable KDE environment, latest software, and most of the tools to do my work and my additional experiments at home.

For those that don't know, Tumbleweed rarely holds back on releasing the latest software (I generally have over 200 packages to update weekly). Opensuse Leap or the more popular Ubuntu OS would generally provide bug fixes and patches from new versions through backporting. I'm currently running Kernel 4.18.5 as I type this. I manually run patch command inside 'screen', something I've pushed myself to do more recently as in a GUI terminal is just unsafe. I've had my KDE session die during an update leaving core system software not updated (libraries needed to run software management like zypper and rpm was just removed and the new version didn't install, also most other commands didn't work because...glibc is broken). Anyway, other than what I believe is my user error sometimes causing major issues, usually it's more of a pain to deal with GPU drivers from Nvidia or AMD. This is because they're always one step behind in releasing drivers for the kernel and opensourced version is still not on par with performance.

It's not fun when something breaks...and that's pretty often. There just isn't enough time for full testing of every new feature from thousands of software packages included. However, I've found that I've had less major issues such as Ubuntu's problematic kernel modules I've had in the past when I ran it for a short few months before going back to Opensuse. I've yet to had to roll back a kernel update since I started using Opensuse over 10 years ago.

With Linux, you need to be prepared to fix something in the terminal if an update goes bad. Or use btrfs for rollback, or not, because I ran it a few years go happily until SSD garbage collection made things unusually slow and eventually corrupted my data one day.

Mac OS

Oh man. I'm not sure how to get going so I don't offend anyone here. I had a 2017 Macbook Pro 13" with 16GB memory so it was no slouch. I won't get into my many problems with it in the few weeks I had it and just focus on patching. I don't like the process.

No frequent patches - I refuse to believe that Mac OS, the second most popular OS requires almost no patches between major versions. Some will argue that's because the OS is secure. Um, I'm sorry but no system is that secure unless it's a brick. While it's less popular than Windows systems, it does attract less attention from hackers and thus less vulnerabilities are discovered. However, OSX security issues stats is still long. Now let's look at Windows security issues stats. What's interesting here is that in 2017, OSX had 299 vulnerabilities (158 remote code execution) and Windows 10 had 268 (50 remote code execution).

Update process - Generally they're delivered in a way where you'd have to stop doing everything on the computer and just wait for about an hour before it's done. I went through this process at work and I just couldn't really believe how none of the update can be done before I'm ready to leave my computer alone. On this front, both Windows and Linux are fairly good at doing now.

Critical patches - Ones like how it was easy to enter no password to gain root access get patches quickly enough so they're staying on top of them at least.

Turning off updates

...is a bad idea...

  • General: you'll be susceptible to all kinds of attacks
  • General: the longer you wait, more likely an update will break
  • Windows: Some software may no longer work properly or even install
  • Linux: after a year+, update server cert expires requiring fix
  • Mac: Um...seems Windows 10 is more secure so just don't!

end rant

Anyway, that's my rant. I don't write these often unless something seriously bothers me.

PLEASE DO NOT turn off automatic updates or at least be very vigilant with updates. You wouldn't ignore an engine light on your car's dashboard or some brake noise. It's not the 2000s anymore, updates are easy now. Just do it!