There's one Linux myth that I'd like to knock down for good. Updates.
One of the rants of the anti-Windows crowd is on updates. Long story short, its a bogus argument that Linux is any more stable/bug free/secure than Windows.
Having been running Ubuntu Linux for about 2 months now, I am prompted with updates almost every day or every other day. And many of these updates are security related, dealing with buffer overflows, denial-of-service attacks (yes I have Apache running on my Linux box) etc. Here are some examples of recent updates:
Version 0.6.25-1ubuntu6.1:
* SECURITY UPDATE: denial of service via invalid DNS packet
- debian/patches/CVE-2010-2244.patch: fail gracefully on corrupt
packets in avahi-core/socket.c.
- CVE-2010-2244
* SECURITY UPDATE: denial of service via invalid DNS packet
- debian/patches/CVE-2010-2244.patch: fail gracefully on corrupt
packets in avahi-core/socket.c.
- CVE-2010-2244
Yes, there was a time till atleast Windows XP days when updates were painfully apparent. But with the auto-update feature in Vista and Windows 7, all that is transparent now. With the occassional polite bubble telling me that my system was rebooted as a result of updates.
Bottom line, Linux (atleast the Ubuntu distribution) is no more update free that Windows. And I would go so far as to say that the updates are much more and much more frequent.
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