The older versions had a few bugs. It's moved on. Grown up. Like a Young hooker. Still no viruses, but far better at it than Bill Gates wife.
Windows has so many viruses mainly due to one reason, market share. Approximately 88% of computers surfing the web are running windows, if you're someone mucking around trying to hack stuff do you target the 88%, many of whom are idiots or the 1% of computers that run linux, most of whom are tech geeks given their choice of operating system? You go for the 88% every day of the week. Sure Windows, particularly the earlier versions are quite venerable to attack but at the end of the day it's a numbers game. It's also the same reason you don't see many for the Mac although imo that's rapidly changing, look at the big malware outbreak this week on OSx.
End of the day Windows and to a lesser extent OSx have the software, the marketing and the money behind them so Linux doesn't have a hope. A massive percentage of software and almost all of the games are written solely for Windows, until this changes Linux will continue to be the realm of Microsoft haters and those who like to 'tinker under the hood'; OSx the realm of hipsters.
What most people want is "Point and Click" which is what Windows delivers.
Are there any versions of Linux that do that?
Windows web developer here and I made the switch to Ubuntu about a month ago (dual boot just in case of course) and I love it.
All my work for a Windows environment has always been done on virtual machines anyway, so I have an Ubuntu base and run one of several virtual machines running Windows Server on top of it.
I find Ubuntu not quite perfect, but it's easily matched the functionality I had in windows and, so far, all of the added programs have been free. The Unity gui that is the default on 11.04 is nice, I had a week or so on the Gnome gui with 10.10 and think I actually prefer Unity. My one gripe is that Thunderbird doesn't interface with Unity very nicely just yet (the email icon in the top right doesn't update), but I'm aware that it's early days.
So Ubuntu is more stable and less prone to viruses than Microsoft Windows.
So is a house brick.
A house brick is also just as good at running software like Photoshop or Fallout 3 as Ubuntu is.
I turn it on.. then click on some stuff...
and I can read stuff like this page
Don't get nasties from the web due to good walls of fire and some bot scanner doodads.
Why complicate the sh!t?
Count me in as one more who claims to be a specialist having worked in this business for umpty years
(have been Unix all of my working life, but also heavy involved in Windows - server side & kernel. So I don't lean either way.)
"lots of people still say its fantastic": that's normal. I'm looking for a car, and most Jetta driver say Jetta is good, and so on. It's a religion thing, can't reason with extremists (including me).
"great on server-side": yes, but I think poster meant for home-based PCs.
"virii": any OS would get them if they were widely spread as PCs, which plain Ubuntu isn't. I'll wait for some stable release of Ubuntu to get into serious market share, say 25% of desktop usage, before claiming it was solid. Said otherwise, if I were to develop a Trojan, I'd go for the %, which is Windows. BTW, never had a virus on Windows, after 20 years of heavy Web usage and downloading bible verses. Viruses seem to be related to users rather than OS... (same people getting them)
"vi": it's like steno, you like it or you don't. If you do: it does miracle with the pattern matching and all. I use on Windows as well for heavier texts.
Hey, 2 half-long replies !
"Installation for home use": we home-based Unix users are usually hacks (I have both). Nothing wrong with that, but they praise their OS, whilst at the same time bitching about having spent another weekend trying to find a driver for this-that.
"difficulty of home installation": yes some versions of Unix, esp. in the past, would put you on prompts - it seems to be an (unfortunate) choice of implementation. I understand anyone who would ditch an OS because of prompts at install time.
"It actually boggles my mind that people can have problems with the late releases of latest-Unix-flavour-here": sorry, but we've heard that for 10 years now. It's such a broken record. Also heard for the last 10 years: "yeah, but the latest release really is the right one."