New Zealand (South Island)
Seth Kenlon is a UNIX geek, free culture advocate, independent multimedia artist, and D&D nerd. He has worked in the film and computing industry, often at the same time. He is one of the maintainers of the Slackware-based multimedia production project Slackermedia.
Authored Comments
This is such a refreshing story. It seems that the "design" industry is plagued with myths that you just can't do quality design work on open source. whether it's graphic design or page layout. It's wrong, and a little insulting if you're one of the people who DO design work on an open source stack. I'd love to hear more stories like yours.
This is a big security topic, but generally speaking you are correct; regardless of OS, security is ultimately up to the administrator of the system (on the home desktop, that's the everyday user).
Of course, none of this changes the fact that it was a virus that prompted the author to investigate other options, and I don't believe the author was suggesting that viruses can't happen on a given OS.
Your 2% estimate is a little off, however. The desktop market is hard to get numbers on for several reasons, but 2% sounds pretty low. Also, the number of servers running Unix and Linux is staggering by comparison, so the insinuation that Linux and Unix are not targets is ignoring a significant install base.
It's enlightening to subscribe to a security vulnerabilities RSS feed, such as
http://www.securityfocus.com/rss/vulnerabilities.xml to keep tabs on some of the major exploits (it's also interesting that many exploits in closed source systems are never directly revealed to the public, which makes preventing them more difficult even if you're an informed user/admin).