Ask HN: Is Linux Safe to Daily drive in 2026?

I'll take a contrarian view here. Disclaimer: I'm interpreting "safe" as in "usability". I've been driving Ubuntu for years for gaming purposes, and it's come a long way. Most drivers are installed out-of-the box. The apps I care about run just fine.

But.... Relative to MacOS Ubuntu is certainly not as user-friendly. It's worth noting that Linux distros will force you to confront the command line at some point. If you come from OS-es where the most technical thing you have to do is pop open settings to set screen-share permissions or "right-click -> open" to install a package, you'll notice a stark difference.

Linux out of all those three is very specific in that it can be configured to be perfectly secure and, at the same time, if you explicitly ask it to shoot you in the foot, it will.

Generally the out-of-the-box experience of Ubuntu and Fedora is at least as secure or better than that of Windows. macOS tends to lean towards a more hardened configuration. Matching that is possible (Android being a great example), but will require some work on your part and is generally not worth it unless you download and run untrusted software.

And one area where desktop Linux really shines is how easy it makes it to only limit yourself to software you can generally trust: that in the default repositories. If you use a well-maintained distribution, keep your system up to date, and only use software that your distribution delivers, chances of your machine getting compromised by anything other than a strictly targeted attack are very slim.

It's understandable that eventually you might want to run third-party software. In that case, I'd definitely advise against running random scripts or commands from the Internet, especially the `curl | bash` kind, and adding third-party repositories to your system unless you absolutely trust their source. This and running out-of-date Internet-facing software are the most common attack vectors.

For third-party software, consider using Flatpak (desktop) and Podman/Docker (server). These sandbox software by default, limiting the damage it can do to your system. With Flatpak, always pay attention to what permissions your application will be granted (those are listed at installation time) and try to limit their scope as narrowly as possible. You can manage the permissions with `flatpak info -M` and `flatpak override`. There's also Flatseal, a GUI alternative which I personally haven't tried.

One more thing to watch out for: extensions. Some software, such as Visual Studio Code and derivatives, has very lax policies on extensions. Even if you install it from a trusted source, but then install an untrusted extension, the extension will run with full access to your files! If you're using such programs, I recommend installing them in Flatpak and limiting their permissions as well. I've been burned by some VSCode extensions in the official marketplace that immediately contacted Chinese IPs upon installation.

Of course, those are tips for those looking to get started. Long-time users interested in hardening should definitely look into SELinux, seccomp, namespaces, dm-verity, and their associated utilities.

It was safe to daily drive in 1996.

This, exactly. I tend to run into a lot of problems, but that is mostly because I tend to tinker with it in non-standard ways (hard to be surprised about your computer no longer booting when you intentionally tried to change the encryption setup). However, if you install a distro closest to your use-case and and then stick with just general applications (i.e. the kind you can get from Flatpak), you should not run into issues.

Of course, some things will randomly break unexpectedly, but you get that with Windows and MacOS, too.

I've been using it exclusively for a few years now, but I'd still say: it depends. e.g. we've yet to see an actual photoshop replacement in OSS (Krita seems to be on a good trajectory now that they've pivoted to a broader scope). First stop is checking whether you have viable replacements for things that you use.

Ubuntu is going to strong-arm you into Snaps, the snap-ectomy is nontrivial, and they have a habit of reappearing. Some people don't have a problem with Snaps - so non-issue if you don't care. Otherwise I'd go with a downstream distro that removes them: pop os, mint, or even upstream (Debian).

XFS is an extremely mature file system if you don't need anything fancy, and you're probably less likely to lose data compared to $proprietary. The other major ones (ext4 and btrfs) are probably just as good, but XFS honestly does stand out in terms of maturity and simplicity.

A common trap is trusting the installer with partitioning. My last Ubuntu installation ran out of space on EFI. 5gb is overkill, but given how abundant disk space is, who cares. Separating / and /home is a good idea for rescue/reinstalling but without btrfs subvolumes (Ubuntu uses btrfs subvolumes by default) it becomes a bit challenging to figure out how to dice things up: e.g. docker containers are stored in /var, so they can deplete your system drive space. Last time I didn't use btrfs, 200gb for / never caused issues for me.

Oh, and Windows has a habit of removing other boot loaders from its drive. If you dual boot, use a different disk for the entire installation.

That's really the extent of the gotchas I'd give to a person literate enough to install an OS. I would slightly urge towards immutable (Silverblue), but Ubuntu is just fine.