I would say Linux and Windows are likely roughly equivalent in almost all safety concerns for regular users (if we normalize for how good a target they are whic

I would say Linux and Windows are likely roughly equivalent in almost all safety concerns for regular users (if we normalize for how good a target they are which makes Windows get targeted more in absolute terms, and ignore technical merits of the kernel and secure access/ACL systems, which I think aren't really what this discussion is about). There might be a slight edge in Linux in that the main way of getting software, the base OS repos and package manager, are about as trustworthy as you can get if you trust the OS to run in the first place, and generally they are packaging and shipping a lot more software that they've vetted, and built themselves and verified with the system than Windows does, which allows the regular user to not lower that trust as much. Windows is getting closer, in that they have their store now and you can even use winget to install things from it, but those things aren't packages by MS (even if they might be vetted to some degree), so it's note quite the same. In some aspects it's better and in some worse, actually (there's a benefit to the OS maintainers tracking and building stuff themselves). Beyond the main OS software, it gets into trust relationships and quickly becomes the exact same regardless of OS, as long as you're allowed to install arbitrary software. This is as opposed to a walled garden, which is explicitly trading away convenience (of one type) and choice for security (and uniformity, but that's not a given), in the same way but the opposite direction as curl piping a script to bash which is trading away security for convenience. I wrote elsewhere in this thread (multiple times, to various degrees) how the trust relationship to the source is the real question, and not really different in the desktop OS cases (in case I wasn't clear and you want more words on it to clarify my opinion). > There's nothing magical in Linux that would protect a large and careless enough userbase. Nope, there isn't, just as there isn't in Windows or Mac OS (yet, but they're both heading that direction to some degree with their stores).