Yes, sigh. Because your opinion, no matter how dearly held, is not the same as facts.
Hell, why stop there? You can claim that Linux has been a desktop system ever since the development of the X11 GUI.
X11 predates Linux by many years. You need to understand the subject matter at hand before you make pronouncments from the depths of your experience.
Naturally, these things do in fact exist for Linux, but they're harder to use than their Windows counterparts.
In your opinion. Factually, numerous studies have indicated that Linux usability is actually better than Windows. You seem to not be able to understand that just because something is different doesn't make it harder. It's just different. Users that have never used a computer tend to find distros like Ubuntu and Mandriva easier than Windows.
When the Linux community reduces the usage complexity to make these things just as easy and automatic as they are on Windows, they will also open the door to the same kind of exploitation.
You keep coming back to this point but have yet to introduce any factual data other than your opinion as to why this may be true. On the other hand, I've posted links to several articles and white papers that show the differences in Windows and Linux architecture that indicate that it's not true.
Heh. You think you can condescend me regarding my familiarity with the computer security community. That's funny.
Yes, I can. Because I've been working professionally in the security community for over ten years and professionally as a system administrator for even longer. I've managed Unix and Windows networks, Cisco gear, Checkpoint firewalls, SANs, and just about anything else you can plug a network cable into. And in all those years, and all of the dollars that Microsoft has said that it's poured into securing Windows, Windows is just as full of holes today as it was then. Every new version is supposed to finally eliminate privilege escalation and remote exploits, but it doesn't.
In that same time I've seen the apologists keep saying that Unix will eventually become as malware-infested as Windows and it just hasn't happened.
And that's because Windows architecturally is a security problem and nothing short of a complete rewrite and abandonment of backwards compatibility will ever make it secure. And Unix has solid security underpinnings and while there are minor problems from time to time, it will never have the same kinds of problems Windows has.
I've already answered this but you gloss over it like a FNORD. Therefore, this post is for the benefit of folks reading this thread, lest they fall for your continuous attempts to side-track the discussion by missing or ignoring my primary point.
So, I'm going to have to perform the objectively silly act of quoting myself, from my own post #132. Knitebane, you probably aren't going to see anything below this paragraph, but the rest of readers will see a very simple explanation of why your fetishization of Linux security characteristics doesn't actually help in the context of a naive desktop user.
The vast majority of malware on desktops today didn't get there through an errant message or a malformed packet or a buffer overflow. It got there because the user clicked on something they didn't know they weren't supposed to click on.
Because of this, I really, really don't care how quickly Microsoft or Red Hat issue patches, nor what those patches are. I'm happy to grant you the premise, for purposes of this discussion, that Linux systems are less buggy and less vulnerable to 0day remote exploits than Windows. It's irrelevant, because that's not how attacks come.
My Debian box at home is not vulnerable to attacks by the Downadup worm. It is also not vulnerable to attacks by velociraptors. But at the end of the day, when I go install some shareware game on my Debian box, I put myself at just as much risk as I would on Windows.