They mention it later in the article; if they drop connections to internal networks from the graph, Linux shoots up all the way to 97%.
The answer is probably that people that run Linux are far more likely to run a homelab intranet that isn't secured by HTTPS, because internal IP addresses and hostnames are a hassle to get certificates for. (Not to mention that it's slightly pointless on most intranets to use HTTPS.)
> If you exclude navigations to private sites, then the distribution becomes much tighter across platforms. In particular, Linux jumps from 84% HTTPS to nearly 97% HTTPS when limiting the analysis to public sites only.
Sounds like it's just because a large chunk of Linux usage is for web interfaces on the local machine or network, rather than everyday web browsing.
Silly question and one I should probably already know the answer to but never really got around to thinking through: are there practical concerns for not doing TLS in your home intranet?
It means that if someone has patched into your local network they can access anything in there, but they have to get in first, right? So how concerned should one be in these scenarios
(a) one has wifi with WPA2 enabled
(b) there's a Verizon-style router to the outside world but everything is wired on the house side?
Main reason is that it's hard to get certificates for intranets that all devices will properly trust.
Public CAs don't issue (free) certificates for internal hostnames and running your own CA has the drawback that Android doesn't allow you to "properly" use a personal CA without root, splitting it's CA list between the automatically trusted system CA list and the per-application opt-in user CA list. (It ought to be noted that Apple's personal CA installation method uses MDM, which is treated like a system CA list). There's also random/weird one-offs like how Firefox doesn't respect the system certificate store, so you need to import your CA certificate separately in Firefox.
The only real option without running into all those problems is to get a regular (sub)domain name and issue certificates for that, but that usually isn't free or easy. Not to mention that if you do the SSL flow "properly", you need to issue one certificate for each device, which leaks your entire intranet to the certificate transparency log (this is the problem with Tailscale's MagicDNS as a solution). Alternatively you need to issue a wildcard certificate for your domains, but that means that every device in your intranet can have a valid SSL certificate for any other domain name on your certificate.
> You can get $2/yr domain names on weird TLDs like .site, .cam, .link, ...
You can, but as stated - that's not free (or easy). That's still yet another fee you have to pay for... which hurts adoption of HTTPS for intranets (not to mention it's not really an intranet if it's reliant on something entirely outside of that intranet.)
If LetsEncrypt charged 1$ to issue/renew a certificate, they wouldn't have made a dent in the public adoption of HTTPS certificates.
> Not necessarily, you don't route the domain externally, and use offline DNS challenge/request to renew the certificate.
I already mentioned that one, that's the wildcard method.
Perhaps you might worry about hostile IOT doodads snooping on things that arent their business or making insecure public webpages with UPNP. If it is just devices you truly control and you never expose an unhardened device, then a walled garden can be fine.
Also, if WPA2 ever becomes extremely broken. There was a period of 3-5 yrs where WEP was taking forever to die at the same time that https was taking forever to become commonplace and you could easily join networks and steal facebook credentials out of the air. If you lived in an apartment building and had an account get hacked between maybe 2008-2011, you were probably affected by this.
Why is Linux adoption at 80% when MacOS/Android/Windows are at 95%? Quite unexpected.