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I don't quite get the point you are trying to make here, but few people attack targets anymore to get respect. They do it to make money.

They attack for various reasons that I'll classify into three groups:

1) Your criminals for money. They don't care about what OS is used more. They go for the target for money. These are not germane to the discussion.

2) Script kiddies: These guys care about the most prominent OS, so they can do the modern equivalent of vandalism with the most effect. Nobody likes these guys, and the hackers despise them, but they're the ones always in the news..

3) Hackers (actually, crackers): These guys are doing it to push the limits of technology and gain respect among their peers. They want to crack the harder targets. Usually you'll never know they were there unless you read the hacker channels.

I think group #2 (script kiddies) and #3 (hackers) actually are a lot alike, at least in intent. The big difference being that the later knows what they are doing and that leaving traces means more opportunity to get caught, and the former doesn't.

I'm not really impressed with anyone that breaks into other people's machines, no matter what they do there. At school I had a couple friends and we would quite often break into each others machines and change the background, etc. It wasn't too difficult. My suitemate's debian box took me the longest to break into, because I never had physical access to it and it didn't run many services, but we eventually got that one too when he was a little too slow in updating packages, just took a couple months. Now this was all in good fun, with each others consent, and pretty strict ground rules (i.e. you didn't mess with a machines that had important school work on them, and the week a project was due you didn't mess with anything, and you made it really clear what you did). But it demonstrated to all of us that these "hackers" are really more persistent than smart.

-paridel