Windows is insecure by design - or is it?

Posted Mar 16, 2004 7:11 UTC (Tue) by mdekkers (guest, #85)
In reply to: Windows is insecure by design - or is it? by eru
Parent article: Mainstream means more malicious code for Linux (SearchSecurity.com)

"By the way, reading LWN and other Linux boards, I frequently get the impression that people think of Windows as it was at about the Windows 98 level (or even at Windows 3.1 level, depending on when they stopped using it), and then criticise its ridiculous instability etc. compared to Linux. However, Windows has not been standing still, no doubt having been greatly spurred on by the competition from Linux. It is a lot more solid than it used to be. Linux can keep ahead, but it is not automatically a given."

This may seem to be the case when you compare Win98 with Win2K or somesuch, but comparing Windows to Linux is a nobrainer. I use Linux as my regular desktop, but also use Mac OSX and Windows every now and then (OSX a lot more often then Windows, though). I have yet to see frequent crashes in anything other then a bleeding edge app, and have yet to that app take the whole machine down with it. My time working on Linux is spent working, not fiddling about trying to make the machine work, or figuring out why it comes tumbling down all the time. Windows and Mac OSX on the other hand are always going down hard. Granted, it is less then with Win98, but it is still a lot more often then with Linux.

I think it due to the fact that it is proprietary software, as opposed to Open Source. Open Source developers can "release whe it's ready". Closed Source ships to an arbitrary deadline, usually "ready or not"....