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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

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Is there an advantage of using doas over sudo (self.linux)

submitted 8 months ago by whyisthesheep to c/[email protected]

72 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I see people talking about doas saying it's just like sudo but with less features. I'm just wondering if there is any situation where you should use doas or if it's just personal preference.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Sudo is 6 megabytes

[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Damn, that's like 4 floppies!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

The concern is not storage space, but potential bugs leading to security issues. For OpenBSD this is very important, and so they made doas.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I understand the concern - but it's not warranted. LOC is a bad predictor of security. And fwiw /usr/bin/sudo on my system is only 227K.

The OpenBSD team does fantastic work. I'm assuming doas will be a good tool and probably more secure that sudo generally. But "size" isn't the best way to determine that. It's not even a good way.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

Tedu (author of doas) wrote about it in 2015:
"There were some concerns that sudo was too big, running too much code in a privileged process. And there was also pressure to enable even more options, because the feature set shipped in base wasn’t big enough. (As shipped in OpenBSD, the compiled sudo was already five times larger than just about any other setuid program.)"
https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/doas