Maybe we can not get 100% certainty, but even so, how could the average user afford to have reasonable trust in a certain Gnu/Linux distro? y ‘average user’ I mean someone who can only do a base install and is not an IT professional and therefore cannot inspect the source code by themselves, nor use/understand specialized tools for analyzing the software in detail; a ‘newbie’, in other words.Simply saying something like “Hey, look, the code is freely available there on the web!” does not really help, because one cannot easily find out if that code is exactly the same as the one that is in the compiled file.Making a parallel with the food industry: If you know that after an audit company X was found out of mismatching the ingredients in the actual product with those on the product’s label, how much would you be inclined to still buy and eat their product, assuming decent alternatives exist? Hopefully this topic will help more people make an informed decision when choosing their operating system. What answers would not help are those:dealing solely with the nature of closed/proprietary code vs free/open source code (that area is already clear – we are interested in how much can we trust a free open source project) -stating only that ultimately there is impossible to have trust in any software (such an answer does not help one make an informed decision) -off-topic or derogatory statements (such an answer, besides being offensive, does not help one make an informed decision) Please, keep the topic on the linux distros, on the operating system; do not divert it on how Google and Facebook are the greater concerns etc. For more details : whiteboard animation