They are still missing something like capability based security like iOS and Android have where apps have to be granted access to use things like files or the camera. It may have been considered secure a couple decades ago, but they have fallen behind the competiton.

Take filesystems, the official filesystems are UFS(1/2) and ZFS (and i think UFS is deprecated). They have GEOM as LVM and LUKS and more.

That being said, the majority of money and development goes into Linux, which by itself may make it a better system (eventually)

What the parent poster meant is that you first need a way to run arbitrary code before local privilege escalation matters, so the exploit chain has to include _something_ that gets you local code execution.

I tend to agree with the parent poster, for most modern single-user linux devices, local privilege escalation means almost nothing.

Like, I'm the only user on my laptop. If you get arbitrary code execution as my user, you can log my keystrokes, steal my passwords and browser sessions, steal my bitcoin wallet, and persist reasonably well.... and once you've stolen my password via say keylogging me typing `sudo`, you now have root too.

If you have a local privilege escalation too, you still get my passwords, bitcoin wallet, etc, and also uh... you can persist yourself better by injecting malware into sshd or something or modifying my package manager? idk, seems like it's about the same.

The answer heavily depends on your configuration. Unprivileged with a spartan syscall filter and a security profile is very different than privileged with the GPU bindmounted in (the latter amounts to a chroot and a separate user account).