I would have liked to know this too, had I not switched to Linux a couple years ago. In fact, I might change my tagline to, “Virus-free since switching to Linux.”
I’d tell Windoze to kiss my ass, but I’d be afraid of catching something.
Although I applaud your boldness and insight in going “Linux”, your response doesn’t answer my question. But thanks anyway.
I run Windows and Linux.
I use Linux for servers; the usual Apache and MySQL, Subversion, a shopping-cart, an image-processing library.
I use Windows for everything else.
To get the high reliability of Linux, you’ve got to use the command-line interface. Which for me is a royal pain. I don’t like having to pore through a half-dozen websites to get the answer if I can’t find it on one of my half-dozen cheat sheets.
Tried Debian last summer. Tried both Gnome and KDE GUIs. Couldn’t get used to KDE’s weird organization, and Gnome was considerably less reliable than Windows. Couple of times a day I’d be doing things in Gnome, opening files, installing software, editing stuff, and all of a sudden... =POOF=. No more Gnome. Screen goes black. Hit a few keys to get to the command line. Linux still there, but Gnome collapsed.
Re-launch Gnome, great. There it is. Only problem: my whole session, everything I was doing, is gone.
Sure, no BSOD. Sure, the underlying Linux OS didn’t crash, and was still operating. Sure, Apache didn’t skip a beat.
But the GUI part of it dumped everything I was doing into intersteller space. That’s a pain. That doesn’t happen with Windows 7, and it didn’t happen with Windows XP.
GUIs are hard. They have to be able to handle an incredible range of different missions, different user habits, different configurations, different combinations of apps. Lots of asynchronous events. Lots of variables.
Windows is a more solid GUI. Linux is a more solid OS, maybe, but only if you’re doing a limited number of relatively simple things.