You really need to upgrade to UNIX Version 6 or later. Some of the improvements since 1974 are well worth having.

Really in /etc plain text? I could see some random app possibly doing that somewhere in ~/.config, but I don't think Linux itself stores passwords in plain text for systemwide use.

You know `/etc/passwd` doesn't really have passwords in it.

I thought Linux stored plain text credentials owned by root that require elevated permissions.

> Linux stores plenty of passwords in plain text in /etc

That's gonna be a big ol' [CITATION NEEDED] from me, dawg.

That's not what that is saying. It's saying don't use an _online_ password manager instead of the browser one. In the very opening they state that simple implementations are great and even lists some. Then the rest of the article dives specifically into online password managers, which are something else.

Where?

> Good examples of simple and safe password managers are keepass and keepassx

Browser-based password management serves the purpose of locking users into a specific browser; I'd much rather have the freedom to switch browsers at will without the cognitive tax of securely moving all my creds every time I want to switch my main browser.

KeePass is just an encrypted database file with UI around it for usability. You can keep the db on a USB drive, sync it through a cloud storage, e-mail it to yourself, whatever ... It's really not that complicated. BitWarden is the above as a service, I reckon.

Nb. The above refers to KeePassX. No idea what the KeePass without the x is about. Naming things. So hard.

It's a program with a file database.

No fancy browser plugins, the ability to autotype, the db file could be synced with anything you can sync files.

Working search - not sure about BW, but it's opensource implementation (Vaultwarden nowadays?) simply didn't allow to search for the fields you didn't scroll yet to.

The biggest problem is lack of multi-edit functionality - you need keep it in mind if you leave somehwere a copy running 24/7.

Bitwarden has taken investor money, sadly. It's still in good shape for the moment. But the time will come when they place profits above other needs; it's a matter of when, not if.

Bitwarden is cloud bases keepass is local

Windows already has a secure kernel credential store, they could move the Edge password store there with a bit of effort, minimize the splash damage when you retrieve a single password to send over HTTP from the regular user space.

> Credential Guard prevents credential theft attacks by protecting NTLM password hashes, Kerberos Ticket Granting Tickets (TGTs), and credentials stored by applications as domain credentials.

> Credential Guard uses Virtualization-based security (VBS) to isolate secrets so that only privileged system software can access them.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/identity-...

Windows 11* and MacOS also do the job as long as you're using hardware bound passkeys.

* I don't want to speak past my own experience so checking my work, Windows can store passkeys in a TPM if available but falls back to storing on disk... https://helgeklein.com/blog/checking-windows-hello-for-busin...

This makes me miss running Qubes a few years ago, and keeping BitWarden in a separate VM from everything else. I've never felt as secure as when I had that setup.

I'm pretty sure macOS is more like iOS in this respect. At the very least, the passwords are typically secured biometrically and only the one being used is actually decrypted at the time of use.