I used to work in an Internet café in the early-mid 2000s and the first time came across BonziBuddy, it was a very frustrating and time-consuming task to remove

I used to work in an Internet café in the early-mid 2000s and the first time came across BonziBuddy, it was a very frustrating and time-consuming task to remove it (and similar malware) from a Windows OS. I ran Mandriva at home but I became quite familiar with the Windows registry after lots of time spent removing various toolbars/spyware. When you learned the tricks the malware-writers used, you could remove their crap quickly enough. Still, it was like playing whack-a-mole if there were multiple different malicious programs installed on the system and I recall that removing some malware required rebooting into safe mode before attempting to remove it. Soon after this, I started to install GNU/Linux distros on the computers of friends and family to avoid the problem altogether. There was a lot more satisfaction in helping people administer their sensibly designed OS than in continually having to remediate their Windows systems where every user was an administrator and it was so easy for them to install malware.