Is Debian more secure than other Linux distributions (such as Red Hat, SuSE…)?
There are not really many differences between Linux distributions, with exceptions to the base installation and package management system. Most distributions share many of the same applications, with differences mainly in the versions of these applications that are shipped with the distribution’s stable release. For example, the kernel, Bind, Apache, OpenSSH, Xorg, gcc, zlib, etc. are all common across Linux distributions. For example, Red Hat was unlucky and shipped when foo 1.2.3 was current, which was then later found to have a security hole. Debian, on the other hand, was lucky enough to ship foo 1.2.4, which incorporated the bug fix. That was the case in the big rpc.statd problem from a couple years ago. There is a lot of collaboration between the respective security teams for the major Linux distributions. Known security updates are rarely, if ever, left unfixed by a distribution vendor. Knowledge of a security vulnerability is never kept from another distribution vendor, as fixe
