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And even if they were...? Linux still has far fewer pieces of malware written for it than Windows ever did. Windows even had a nice little boost in the early days thanks to its compatibility with another horrible OS, MS-DOS.

Linux has no "binary backwards compatibility" or "legacy poor-security garbage design" to stick to. At least, not nearly to the extent Microsoft products do. And it has no real, market-driven (commercial) reason to.

Edited 2010-06-23 03:17 UTC

Well, Linux doesn't have that much malware written for it for the EXACT reason that these kinds of users largely don't exist on the Linux platform. Why write malware for dumb users to install, if dumb users aren't using the platform? By and large, dumb users don't run servers, so the popularity of Linux as a server platform is irrelevant when comparing how much malware exists for Linux vs Windows.

I have little doubt that if Linux / Windows had an equal amount of dumb users behind the wheel and an equal amount of malware written for them, there'd probably still be more exploits on Windows, but Linux wouldn't exactly be immune either.

Malware that is injected into warez is not taking advantage of backwards compatibility. It has nothing to do with "legacy poor-security garbage design" either. There is no isolation layer within Linux that would protect it from a trojan injected into an executable.

If Linux users were the majority and millions of them were carelessly downloading crap from unverified sources then you would have far more trojans like the one in the Unreal IRCd.
http://www.jfplayhouse.com/2010/06/trust-us-that-linux-trojan-is-no...

Malware today is mostly the product of computer criminals within Eastern Europe looking to profit, not from pricks who are looking to hack for the sake of it.

Edited 2010-06-23 06:47 UTC

On the other hand, Linux has source code backwards compatibility going a lot further than windows... Applications written for early unix systems can often compile and run successfully on a modern linux box.

Most linux malware is in the form of backdoored services that are intended to be manually installed and used by a hacker, whereas windows malware is typically automated because few hackers would manually target windows machines - their only value is in large hordes for ddos/spam purposes.