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this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2023
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Programming
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Windows 7 and later, have even better anti-non-superuser protections than Unix-like systems. It's taken a while for Linux to add a capabilities permission system to limit superusers, something that's been available on Windows all the time.
Er, selinux was released nearly a decade before Windows 7, and was integrated into mainline just a few years later, even before vista added UAC.
Big difference between "not available" and "often not enabled".
Windows 95 already had an equivalent of selinux in the policy editor, "often not enabled". UAC is the equivalent of sudo, previously "not available".
Windows 7 also had runtime driver and executable signature testing ("not available" on Linux), virtual filesystem views for executables ("not available" on Linux), overall system auditing ("often not enabled" on Linux), an outbound per-executable firewall ("not available" on Linux), extended ACLs for the filesystem ("often not enabled" and in part "not available" on Linux)... and so on.
Now, Linux is great, it had a much more solid kernel model from the beginning, and being OpenSource allows having a purpose-built kernel for either security, flexibility, tinkerability, or whatever. But it's still lacking several security features from Windows, which are useful in a generalistic system that allows end-users to run random software.
Android had to fix those shortcomings by pushing most software into a JVM, while Flatpak is getting popular on Linux. Modern Windows does most of that transparently... at a hit to performance... and doesn't let you opt-out, which angers tinkerers... but those are the drawbacks of security.