And Bill Gates is down with "the program". Unlike that unamerican, antisocial hippie, Stallman.

Truly, the use of spaces has caused more problems than it solved. (it actually solved none and caused many, so that is pretty easy)

Then On Topic: the most plausible answers are already given; I think indeed that the distinction between admins and users is one reason, but more likely a mix of things:

- when 95% of all "joe average" people run windows, virus makes go for the biggest impact with the least effort: hence take this platform.
- services running as "root" are a security risk, especially if they have a connection to the outside world
- less obvious, more unclear logging facilities
- obfuscated to the average user what is actually happening on your system (see the logging facilities)

And this probably is not the conclusive list; I don't believe in conspiracy theories, they involve too many people to be likely.

Yeah, their OS in first place x)

Another reason that malware/virus don't work as well on a Linux system:

Compare any two installs of Slackware. You will notice they are NOT the same. One user may have Gnome installed, the other may have no GUI at all. One may have '/' mounted on a sata disk (sda1), the other on a pata (hdb6). Notice that the root of the filesystem does NOT have to be on first Disk, first Partition, like Windows requires.

THAT would drive a malware/Virus nuts. It cannot "rm /usr/local/*". There is no "/usr/local" on my disk. Thus, it would be useless. Same with using dd to delete my drive. Where is it? It has no clue. Same with 'cp *' to wherever. There are too many variables to make a small, malicious program that would be able to slip in without noticing (I would notice a 3M program going through my network)

Which I feel is Linux BEST feature. I set mine up the way I like it. You set yours up the way you like it.

Of course, that's just my 2cents worth.

That's a little optimistic.

If the malware's sole aim was destruction it would just do a rm --no-preserve-root -rf / 2>/dev/null instead. Your lack of a /usr/local isn't going to help much. WARNING!!! Any novices reading this... DO NOT TRY THAT COMMAND! It will erase everything!

If the malware's intent is not total destruction but something more devious, then it doesn't take a very large program to probe around and find out the specifics of your installation, devices, mountpoints and other such variables. Some of todays malware can be very sophisticated.

Hi,
Loads of people don't have a choice of OS. That's what is loaded and they don't know any better.

This has been asked and answered so many times that it's unreal. We have several existing threads that go into this over and over again. So this one is closed.