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I still feel Microsoft has no one to blame but themselves for this. They should have made that clean break, enforced least-privilege policies, when they brought out NT. Those "fine-grained privileges" you mention above have been largely wasted for many years, and would still be if Windows had not become the poster child for malware. All that said, (potentialy controversial statement coming right up I think security- and capability-wise, Linux and Windows each have advantages over the other, but on balance they are pretty much equals. The biggest practical area where Linux/BSD trump Windows today IMHO is flexibility. You can make those OSes just about anything you want. With Windows, you pretty much get what MS gives you. "

I'd disagree only only one point. The biggest practical area where Linux/BSD trump Windows today derives IMO from the fact that for well over a decade, for whatever reasons, the concerted effort of malware authors has been targetted almost exclusively against Windows. The vast library of malware payloads and malware techniques has evolved over that decade along with Windows.

Today, the vast body of malware is effectively impotent when one uses systems other than Windows. Almost without exception, malware is not only targetted at Windows, it depends upon Windows.

One might be able to argue a case that "capability-wise, Linux and Windows each have advantages over the other, but on balance they are pretty much equals" ... but that simply cannot be argued security-wise as a whole. The actual malware corpus itself demands that it cannot be so argued.

Edited 2010-06-24 01:32 UTC