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Unlike Microsoft it is much harder to pin down who put in a backdoor when one is actually discovered. Is it a big problem? Probably not, but people have a false sense of security. People know very little about the true origins of most flavors of Linux these days. Reading through the posts on various threads here gives one a pretty good idea of how much people desire to assign blame to the easily identifiable boogie men and want to believe that there is a safe and viable alternative.

Yesterday, I started up a couple of the Ubuntu Studio installations that I hadn't started for a couple of months. They each took hundreds of updates for the operating system and apps installed... and I have not installed that much extra fluff. I have no idea what all those updates were actually for... I just let it do its thing. Windows typically does maybe half a dozen updates if you haven't started the machine in a while.

Thanks for the input. I delay Windows updates for 90 days after allowing one - which may mean "fixing" a supposed improvement. And Linux rarely should warrant updates.

And I think that smartphones are the least trustworthy devices. And inferior for most computing functions (including moving files) but relative few users seek to enhance efficiency of their desktop PCs - if they even have one anymore.

It is always a pleasure reading your posts. I started another one of my Ubuntu Studio installations that I hadn't used for about 3 months last weeks. We have several laptops and I have them all set up to dual boot. Ubuntu Studio has a bunch of content creation apps built in and I have added others to my installations. They can access data from Windows partitions.

My entry point is not obvious. When you start the computer you have to hit escape within 5 seconds and then choose to start from the Ubuntu partition. What I have installed in Windows cannot easily see what is stored on my Linux partitions. So, sensitive data is a little more secure. So there is a little method to my madness... If for some reason Windows gets screwed up, I still have easy access to all of my data. This Ubuntu Studio installation that I started most recently took 155 updates, which is about what the others did. They were mostly all very small, and the process did not take very long... It would have taken as long or longer to review what they were actually for. I don't have any nags to update in Ubuntu and I have to authorize for the updates to be installed. I have often delayed Windows Updates... This is one of the primary reasons that I have pro-versions installed on any computer that is used for important purposes. It is completely out of laziness that I have not bothered to do this much lately. I agree completely that smartphones are the most worrisome devices as far as any form of security is concerned. It seems ironic that just about every financial institution pushes their customers into using their apps. A good percentage of people have almost no idea that their phones are often the biggest threat to their financial security. If someone gets ahold of your phone and is able to get into your Google account, all sorts of mayhem can result depending on how much you have stored on your phone and/or Google servers. It scares the heck out of me. The thing that I find funny about our resident Linux advocates is that most do not seem to realize that Android is a Linux based OS. Typical young people today are tied to their phones more than to their computers. Linux has already beaten Microsoft in the phone arena. Of course, Apple now has 60% of the smart phone market in the US. In most ways iPhones are more secure... But at this point in time, I have a stronger aversion to Apples policies more than I do to Google and Microsoft policies. But that could change.