Neowin.net

He does take a nice look, and tries to be as balanced as possible, at multiple platforms. One of my earlier complaints about Jeff Jones was his "all" approach to Linux. He seems to have taken the time and effort to balance the configurations as much as possible now, and I applaud him for that.

Nice data, but concluding "X is more secure than Y" is not reasonable given the inherent lack of ability to truly know all that lurks.

In fact, let's use one of the sources of data that Jeff Jones uses for his report: Secunia.

Compare the data for XP Pro, Vista and Red Hat yourself.
You can count the number of advisories, similar to what Jeff does, but not as detailed as his analysis, and you see that Red Hat has twice the number as XP! And Vista has under 30. Now look at the "unpatched" count. Red Hat has none listed. Both XP and Vista show unpatched advisories. What does this tell us? Still not enough.

You cannot judge "more secure" off of these simple metrics. You can just show them in lights that favor a point you want to make. And, if you actually followed those secunia links above, perhaps you already read this yourself, but Secunia puts the following right on those pages:

Again, nice analysis, but your conclusion of absolute security is flawed, stevember.

Yes, but we need consider installed volume too.

Vulnerabilities are found by hackers most time, hacker generally target biggest volume so IMHO Vista and XP should be a lot higher than rest.

But I must stop as I'm sounding like MS fanboy, both my servers Linux.

:P Don't worry. I have jumped in to defend Microsoft on more than one occasion, and I dumped them from my PC 5 years ago (only use Windows at work, on the PC they supply me).

Interesting comment, thanks for that!

You do know that Linux distros cover more software than is available in Vista? Not only that but OSS disclose ALL vulnerabilities, including ones that the community discovers, and MS does not publicize or acknowledge or disclose vulnerabilities to the wild until the last minute. This chart also shows all vulnerabilities on the same level, whether critical or not.

Notice he's posted numbers for "reduced" versions of linux distros. So it's not ALL the software that come with it. The reduced installs are smaller and closer to what a Windows install is.

15 minutes, but read pdf in that time.

But your comment kind off confuses me. Sorry.

Merely exaggerating on the file transfer/copy issue. It seems like one of the more basic operations in computing and somehow it was all screwed up. After sitting through that a few times I went back to XP (30 day demo of Vista)...so win win.

That help? :P

Wasn't there a rather big increase in file transfer with SP1?

I agree, considering the volume Vista machines compared to others and the hackers wanting break anything MS I think they done good job.

End of day why spend time hacking the minority.

If overnight all MS OS machines replaced with Linux or OS X we would have security melt down.

"Aww people can come up with statistics to prove anything. 40% of all people know that" - Homer Simpson

Of course, and they won't believe the statistics when you produce them.