Ubuntu: User friendly and easy to setup
Reviewed by Gabriel Bachmann
Ubuntu
ubuntu.com 2 ratings so far*
Rate Ubuntu: No account needed
Threat level
Covered
A covered pick. Anyone can use it as a private drop-in, with no setup or know-how. Enough for most people. Threat levels
Our take
Ubuntu is the friendly on-ramp to Linux, the distribution with the most tutorials, driver support, and forum answers when something breaks, which matters more than ideology for a first switch. Be aware Canonical has made past privacy missteps and pushes Snap packages some users dislike, so it is a step up from Windows rather than a privacy-maximalist choice. Pick it to get comfortable on Linux easily; tune the defaults or move to something stricter once you know your way around.
Website at a glance
ubuntu.com
B+ score 80
Solid website security headers
Graded by Mozilla HTTP Observatory, tested 4d ago
Inspect this site yourself
Measures the security configuration of the tool's own website, not the privacy of the product itself. A strong tool can still score low here.
Ubuntu alternatives
Fedora Workstation Fedora Workstation: User friendly and easy to setup
macOS Apple's desktop OS. A real privacy step up from Windows, but closed and US-based.
secureblue secureblue is a security-hardened immutable Linux OS built on Fedora Atomic Desktops. It ships as OCI bootable container images and applies kernel hardening, a hardened memory allocator from GrapheneOS, and a hardened Chromium browser called Trivalent.
Kicksecure Kicksecure is a security-hardened Debian-based Linux distribution that applies a broad set of kernel and userspace hardening settings out of the box, reducing the attack surface without requiring manual configuration. It also serves as the foundation for the Whonix anonymity OS.
Fedora Atomic Desktops Fedora Atomic Desktops (Silverblue, Kinoite, and others) are immutable Fedora variants where the base OS is read-only and updated atomically via rpm-ostree. Applications run as Flatpaks, and rollback to a prior OS image is built in.
NixOS NixOS is a Linux distribution built entirely on the Nix package manager, where the whole system (kernel, packages, services, and configuration) is declared in a single set of files. Upgrades are atomic and fully reproducible rollbacks are a built-in feature.
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