Back in the DOS and Windows 3.1 days, they tried to lock it down with whatever software they had. We found a way around it. Even the DOS based menu system, we managed to copy the menu software out with its configuration file. Then we experimented with the “encrypted” password in the configuration file and found out that if we removed it, the system would allow you to do anything but that also meant we could create our own password and look at the “encrypted” password. We quickly found out that it was just shifting the ASCII table. We then “decrypted” the school password. Such 12 your old hackers 😆

I was just to clarify that you’re not sitting with software full of security issues because of older versions of packages. And then some bonus info on what “stable” means in Debian :-)

Old but not necessarily out of date. The system is at a stable state. It’s working and we don’t want to make changes that can compromise stability. New features and other big code changes comes with increased risk of something breaking. Debian Stable means running code that have been tested and used a lot.

Security fixes and critical bugs get back ported if feasible, or a package might get updated to a newer version.

Encryption is not a panacea, because if someone ever forgets their password (something common for the layperson), the data on that drive is inaccessible.

It’s because of stuff like this that Microsoft wants people to create an Microsoft account. Recovery key automatically saved to your Microsoft account. For business the recovery key can also be automatically saved in a central location.

Any respectable company with Windows would be using BitLocker - full disk encryption. It’s super easy to setup if your computer has TPM, fully transparent for the user in most cases.

Debian 3.1, but was not successful in getting X to work, but didn’t put a lot of effort into it. Then I got Mandrake running with X, but went back to Windows. On a small computer, I got FreeBSD running as a server but never used it, so that went away again. Knoppix a couple of times to recover data from failed Windows installations.

Yeah, it’s not until recently that I installed Debian 12 on a old work laptop and was very impressed. Now I’m on the fence of having a stable distribution or sumthin with newer packages. I love the philosophy of Debian and the wide usage on servers but Arch is personally also up my alley, however I have not used it at all.

Corel Linux… that’s a while ago. I remember thinking that it was strange that Corel would come out with a Linux distribution.

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They are just after things that doesn’t benefit them