A couple of decades ago, iirc, SANS.org ( IF I’m remembering who it was who did it ) put a fresh-install of MS-Windows on a machine, & connected it to the internet.
It took SEVERAL MINUTES for it to be broken-into, & corrupted, botnetted.
The auto-attacks by botnets are continuous: hitting different ports, trying to break-in, automatically.
I’ve had linux desktops pwned from me.
the internet should be considered something like a mix of toxic & corrosive chemicals: “maybe” your hand will be fine, if you dip it in for a moment & immediately rinse it off ( for 3 hours ), but if you leave you limbs dwelling in the virulent slop, Bad Things™ are going to happen, sooner-or-later.
I used to de-infest Windows machines for my neighbours…
haven’t done it in years: they’ll not pay-for good anti-virus, they’ll not resist installing malware: therefore there is no point.
Let 'em rot.
I’ve got a life to work-on uncrippling, & too-little strength/time left.
“but I don’t need antivirus: i never get infected!!”
then how come I needed to de-infest it for you??
“but I don’t need an immune-system: pathogens are a hoax!!”
get AIDS, then, & don’t use anti-AIDS drugs, & see how “healthy” you are, 2 years in.
Same argument, different context-mapping.
Tarpit was a wonderful-looking invention, for Linux’s netfilter/iptables, years ago: don’t help botnets scan quickly & efficiently to help them find a way to break-in…
You should only hop if you know what you’re missing out on, if you don’t and don’t have any distro-specific problems, it’s just unnecessary. But if you really feel like it and have enough disk space, you can try dual-booting another distro and see which you like better.
I hopped because I wanted immediate updates and easy compiling (AUR) so I picked an Arch-based OS.
Distro hopping is pretty similar to changing instances on Lemmy. If you don’t have a reason, just keep using your current account.
Other comments have hit this, but one reason is simply to be an extra layer. You won’t always know what software is listening for connections. There are obvious ones like web servers, but less obvious ones like Skype. By rejecting all incoming traffic by default and only allowing things explicitly, you avoid the scenario where you leave something listening by accident.
I guess this is to figure out what is also possible on Linux, and getting to know that not all problems or missing features apply to other distros.
Sometimes you can lwarn amazing stuff, like a KDE distro can be customized to your liking while a Gnome desktop is a nearly forced workflow and design but can be slightly changed with buggy extensions.
Distro Hopping seems to be such a big part of the “Linux experience.”
It’s not, it’s just a way to find the distro that suits you best.
If you’re already satisfied with what you have, there’s no reason to change and you’re not missing out on anything. If you’re ever curious about other distros, install Virtualbox and try them in a VM.
I stopped distro hopping years ago when I started using Linux MX (Debian based), I’m so happy with it that I have no intention to change ever again.
The only other distro I really like is LMDE (Mint based on Debian instead of Ubuntu), so I put that one on my laptop (MX on my gaming desktop).
The time I spent “distro hopping” back in high school was because I didn’t have the balls to commit to a single distro. Even then the only time I actually switched was when I made a config change that blew up in my face so badly I needed to reinstall anyway.
If you’ve found a setup you’re happy with, by all means, stick with it. You’re not missing out on much by not voluntarily erasing your boot drive and installing an entirely new OS every week or so for no reason other than it looked cool.
(If you’re about to suggest dual booting multiple Linux distros, no. Just stop. I tried that once. You would not believe how many issues are caused by sharing a ~/.config between two systems with slightly different versions of the same software.)
For me, it’s primarily #5: I want to know which apps are accessing the network and when, and have control over what I allow and what I don’t. I’ve caught lots of daemons for software that I hadn’t noticed was running and random telemetry activity that way, and it’s helped me sort-of sandbox software that IMO does not need access to the network.
Not much to say about the other reasons, other than #2 makes more sense in the context of working with other people: If your policy is “this is meant to be an HTTPS-only machine,” then you might want to enforce that at the firewall level to prevent some careless developer from serving the app on port 80 (HTTP), or exposing the database port while they’re throwing spaghetti at the wall wrestling with some bug. That careless developer could be future-you, of course. Then once you have a policy you like, it’s also easier to copy a firewall config around to multiple machines (which may be running different apps), instead of just making sure to get it consistently right on a server-by-server basis.
So… Necessary? Not for any reason I can think of. But useful, especially as systems and teams grow.
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