No it’s not. The security gap in windows is built in much like the holes in a swiss cheese or a vault door built of chocolate fudge.

Saying windows vista/7 are “more secure” is like making the comparison “They’re cleaner than” and using Dschinghis Khan’s used undies for a base reference.

That has nothing to do with hate, it’s mere fact.

That and there’s a fundamental difference in how Microsoft and Linux adresses security. With open sourse you instantly get thousands of skilled experts trying to poke holes in the system from the get-go and during development.

With an MS product you get whatever ten security programmers at Microsoft decided was “acceptable” – the rest get left to after-the-fact security patches.

Linux – or, for that matter, any *nix system, including BSD and MacOS – aren’t ever going to suffer the same problems from malware that windows does. It’s a difference of possessing a sliding rice paper screen or a security door for the entrance to your building. One of those will by default always be far harder to get through.

You’re missing a point here. Most people in the know get to help friends and relatives set up their machines and help out with tech problems.

That means you get bootstrapped to a love for Linux right fast. I run windows as my dual myself as I game a lot and am lazy – but it’s the same thing as with you. I can run windows without getting screwed. Friends and relatives usually can’t.

And then they call me. No, it’s a linux install for the lot of them.

Um, basically MacOS without the proprietary bits then? :)

Which is the point. Windows Vista/7 have tried to implement administrative queries on an application level but so far it’s just icing on the cake. It’s just too hard for MS to rewrite their basic system structure in order to allow for decent tiering of system control.

Let’s not forget, windows was natively written so that save for gummed-on security patches the architecture allows a trojan to subvert your entire system just by hijacking any base process (including, in older days, the clock and the help file system).

You CAN write viruses for Mac and Linux – but unlike the way it is with windows it just isn’t enough for a teenaged script kid to copy, paste, and change a name. You need real skills in order to successfully attack a Unix/Linux/BSD system like that.

If 25% of the market were suddenly running Linux instead of windows only one in a thousand virus writers would be able to write successful viruses for that part of the market.

That and the open-source status of Linux guarantees that at any one time there are several thousand security experts continually trying to poke holes in the latest kernel and hand in their fixes at once. Microsoft on the other hand are forced to patch their system LONG AFTER a new malware has been discovered and do absolutely no pre-checking for vulnerabilities.

Whenever I install an OS for a friend or relative who mainly wants their laptop for work and utility I install the latest Ubuntu distro. As a general rule these people call me twice every year in order to fix a setting or some such. Whereas everyone I’ve ever helped install windows tends to call me once a week because there’s a problem.

Linux is out-of-the-box functionality and much resembles MacOS in that regard (which isn’t too surprising given that MacOS is in fact Darwin – a BSD open source OS, close cousin to Linux).

Yes, I run windows too as i play games. But it’s my secondary OS of choice and unlike most common users I know how to tweak windows. Linux is by far easier to use and maintain these days.