so yeah that is s mixture not againt MS but saying that linux is more secure and is unlikely to be vunerable to viruses even if popularity grows. If your using MS then make sure your use some common sense to prevent your self and don’t put all your trust in the prevention software.
Wine is getting better and more and more MS software is supported so using windows apps on linux is possible.

Care to back that ‘unrealistic’ with some data? Item: over twenty national governments have standardized on Linux. Item: Gartner reports that some 80% of Fortune 500 companies use Linux in mission-critical systems, and expect total number of systems - servers and desktops - to increase much faster than overall system growth.

But this blog entry never had much to do with objective factual reality; it’s what’s lovingly called a FUDsicle…. soft and brown and, if you’re not paying attention, you’ll let it go down whole and immediately suffer a brain freeze.

I’ve been developing for Windows literally as long as there’s been a ‘Microsoft Windows’; I can say the same thing about my Mac experience. I’ve been on Linux for a relatively short time - just a bit over ten years. But I do know one thing…

I travel pretty extensively; it’s been over five years since I was primarily based in the US. Up until about a year ago, no matter where I was on the planet, I could count on one thing: at least twice a week, my dad (70+-year-old retired engineer) would phone me for help with his Windows-PC-as-anti-Clapper; “help, it’s fallen and it won’t get up!” About a year ago, my stepmom finally got him converted over to a Mac, saying “it’s cheaper than the phone bill”. Since then, there haven’t been any panicked calls in the middle of (my local) night; I’ve gotten a couple of emails (sent from the Mac) where he says something to the effect of ‘I wasn’t sure how to do X, but I fiddled around with it a little bit and got it working well enough; is this the best way?’ Somehow he, like thousands of other people it has been my job to support over the years, never could do that as Windows usees. I remember five years ago, the personal assistant to a Ph.D. scientist (who had an MBA and a perfectly respectable Ph.D. of her own) said (of her Windows PC), “I’m not going to touch that thing again, except to toss it out the window, and YOU CAN’T MAKE ME!” (She’d gotten at least three viruses in a week’s time.) Given a choice between losing his PA and losing the PC, her boss got her a Mac.

I’ve used Windows for years. I’ve also seen hard statistics in multiple organizations saying that Windows is atrociously expensive to support compared to other systems, and users are less productive. That’s not opinion; that’s not hearsay; that’s actual user data collected in great detail and used to beat appropriate folks over the head with at budget meetings. Your mileage may well vary, but I don’t expect it will objectively vary much.

It is unrealistic to expect that the number of Linux users will grow considerably anytime soon and hardware support will be close to that on Windows. Thus, it is logical to stop dreaming that all the hardware will be supported on Linux and focus on the support of just some hardware. I guess it is OK when a migrant to Linux may have problems with hardware support, provided it is possible to buy functionally equivalent hardware or buy a Linux compatible PC from the very start.

Imagine some hardware has a “Linux ready” label. Producers of other hardware may, and likely will, fear that this influences choices of buyers who will never actually run Linux. Hardware support is less a user number issue than an organizational issue.

Traditionally a Linux user is a technically savvy one who can download, compile and install any required software. Such user is likely to influence decisions on hardware and software purchase and/or technology choice, on Linux, Windows, Max OS, QNX or whatever. Positive attitude of such user may matter for a hardware or software company. Enter lots of Windows migrants, and the Linux user is no better than Windows scum.

I disagree that there’s going to be more virus as apple increases its share. Even though windows wins in the desktop war, it’s not winning the server world. If you want to take down google, yahoo, cnn you should probably target Linux and apache…shouldn’t you? go to http://uptime.netcraft.com/ and put in web sites, yahoo is running freebsd, almost everybody is running linux server with apache. So if you want to cause damage from a virus, which is the point of a virus wouldn’t you target big company computers?

Windows users for ever have claimed that if there were more Linux users it would be less secure. I completely disagree that it would be anywhere near windows problems with virsus. With Linux and open source, nobody would put spyware in their software or if it’s GPL and it’s out there, we would just remove that spyware part. Linux lives off of free open source software, so if it increases I’m sure there would be more closed software, but you won’t find those in most repository. At the end of the day it’s hard to argue over windows security even if numbers increased.

Windows is designed poorly, and allows for applications and the user to do literally whatever they want all the time. Yes, there is the UAC in Vista, but really, after a while most people either just hit allow, or turn it off.

Linux on the other hand is much different there. It is designed to not have the user do the things like Windows does. There are a few side effects that are EXCELLENT:

1) The user is only bugged now and then. The need to have root to run an application is very rare. It comes down to software installation and administration. How often does one use that, rarely in the grand scheme (a few times a week aside from the updates).

2) As a fork of #1, the user will be less irritated when the dialog would come up, thus reading it.

3) If the user should screw up and do something dumb, almost invariably its limited to the scope of that account, leaving the computer still operable. Their data is not kept hostage, nor is it relegated to an anchor until a techie can repair the problem at hand.

4) Most of the software wanted will be FLOSS software from the repos. Ubuntu and Fedora have excellent arrays of software and have/will have access to CNR (haven’t kept up on that … promise?) for commercial apps as Freespire and Linspire users have.

With all of this and more that I am sure to have forgotten, Linux in its nature is inherently better in all scenarios regarding malware and security.

As for the real problems, it boils down to codecs and stupid legalities that the US users have to put up with (hope my dislike of DRM and the stupid laws here in the US hasn’t spoiled your mood .. :D)

Anyway, drink a beer and know you are on a cooler, and better OS. Or a coffee if you are anti-beer

When Linux gets a hiccup, the world gets nervous and looks to find the problem and fixes it.

When Windows gets a problem, the millionaires working for Microsoft sometimes have a more important Golf match to attend to that weekend.