I think it depends also how hard you look, because you can always find an example out there in the world.

To add more to this, I've recommended responsible web use as a step, and honestly that has done me very well for many, many years. I can't tell you the last time I had to do any form of proactive scanning or sanitizing. I think that goes back as far as W98 for me.

I see problems pop-up, mostly on my Android phone, and I avoid them by closing my browser and not re-visiting the site where the pop-up issue showed up. I see problems browsing the web, but will cite my tried and true NoScript and AdBlock+, or now uBlock as add-ons. I rarely have out of control web browser situations. For instance, you can get into forever pop-ups from certain sites. That never happens to me on any of my desktops, Windows, MAC, or Linux. Never to the limit that I never even have to kill my browser by way of avoidance.

Also hydrurga's point about downloading from the proper repositories. Don't download a distribution from somewhere, where the distribution publishers haven't put, or mirrored it. If you have to really, really search for a download link, and do stuff like use torrents or other methods to download, you likely do not want that ISO file.

On a related subject, that of having your computer hacked into, I read the following quote from Gizmo a few days ago and liked it:

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/i...tsa-gizmo.html

To add to rtmistler's comment above, +1 for the NoScript and uBlock (uBlock Origin in my case) browser add-ons.

Yeah, generally it is virus free.

there is NO such thing as a virus / malware FREE computer operating system

you can exploit EVERY!!!!! computing device

now some more than others