I am on the Debian Security Mailing list, and recently there has been a lot of traffic going back and forth about the security (particularly package updates) of Ubuntu vs Debian stable. A guy on the lists asked this:
I'm a new user of the great Debian distro for my Desktop. But when I talked to a friend and I told him, that I'm using Debian (Wheezy) for my desktop computer, he told me that I shoudn't use it because it is not secure. He told me to use Ubuntu instead. He explained that with the fact, that Ubuntu has more security features enabled than Debian (also more compiler flags for security) in a fresh install. He gave me a link to the following site:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Security/Features
So, I'm very happy with Debian but because my friend seems to be an expert for Linux, I don't know if I can use Debian. Can you tell me which of the security features promoted by Ubuntu are also enabled in Debian?
I was wondering if anyone had their two bits to add...