[hockey]

Can some of the staff on this great website set the record straight. Which OS is better, as far as virus and malware attacks are concerned. Now I have always purchased PC's. If what I hear is true then Apple here I come. Will there ever be an OS in the future where malware and virus attacks become obsolete?? Or am I dreaming in technocolour?

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Can some of the staff on this great website set the record straight. Which OS is better, as far as virus and malware attacks are concerned. Now I have always purchased PC's. If what I hear is true then Apple here I come. Will there ever be an OS in the future where malware and virus attacks become obsolete?? Or am I dreaming in technocolour?

Well, lets begin with Apple is a company that sells hardware (Macintosh computers, etc) and an OS (OS X) and PCs are personal computers. Personal Computers include Macintosh computers as well as non-Apple hardware.

I have issue with Apple, but not OS X. The issue is that they lock the OS to their hardware and I do not like the choice of hardware they allow me.

You can check out my article on my choice of OS - here, but the short of it is you should be comparing the Freedom From Choice of OS X, the Freedom of Hardware of Windows and the Total Freedom of Linux (in my case Ubuntu). All three offer different positive and different negatives.

Vista is VERY secure.
OS X has been secure, but has not really been tested. In the last two Can-Sec West "pwn to own" contests OS X was hacked first.
Linux is very secure (and was not successfully hacked at "pwn to own".

The great thing with Linux is you do not need to buy higher priced Apple hardware to give it a try... and with a Live CD it is very easy to give it a shot.

[indigo196]

Can some of the staff on this great website set the record straight. Which OS is better, as far as virus and malware attacks are concerned. Now I have always purchased PC's. If what I hear is true then Apple here I come. Will there ever be an OS in the future where malware and virus attacks become obsolete?? Or am I dreaming in technocolour?

Well, lets begin with Apple is a company that sells hardware (Macintosh computers, etc) and an OS (OS X) and PCs are personal computers. Personal Computers include Macintosh computers as well as non-Apple hardware.

I have issue with Apple, but not OS X. The issue is that they lock the OS to their hardware and I do not like the choice of hardware they allow me.

You can check out my article on my choice of OS - here, but the short of it is you should be comparing the Freedom From Choice of OS X, the Freedom of Hardware of Windows and the Total Freedom of Linux (in my case Ubuntu). All three offer different positive and different negatives.

Vista is VERY secure.
OS X has been secure, but has not really been tested. In the last two Can-Sec West "pwn to own" contests OS X was hacked first.
Linux is very secure (and was not successfully hacked at "pwn to own".

The great thing with Linux is you do not need to buy higher priced Apple hardware to give it a try... and with a Live CD it is very easy to give it a shot.

[The Admiral]

Hi hockey,

You're looking for an operating system that isn't as vulnerable to malware as its competitor. Most people would agree that Windows is more susceptible to malware than an Apple OS is that so many more people use Windows than Apple. According to the latest estimates, 89.62% of computer users run a Windows OS, and only 8.87% run an Apple OS. <source> If you were designing malware, would you design something that could affect 90% of the computers in the world, or 9%? That is frankly the reason that more malware is designed for Windows in mind.

That said, there are more reasons than malware for choosing Windows over Apple, or vice versa. Don't choose an OS based simply on malware susceptibility, because you can keep a Windows PC protected by running up-to-date antivirus and firewall software. There is much more involved in an OS, and I urge you to consider all of the things you normally do on your computer and do research based on that. Games, multimedia, email, web browsing... it's different across platforms, and if you realize that the games that you use in Windows won't work in an Apple OS, or that an Apple OS has more user-friendly multimedia applications than a Windows OS, that's what you should base a decision on.

But yes, an Apple computer is less susceptible to malware than a Windows computer. <source - good read>

Edited by The Admiral, 09 December 2008 - 12:02 AM.

[hockey]

I thank you both for your comments. My last concern wasn't answered. Will there be a time in the near future where we can browse the internet without malware attacks, zero? An OS that is inpenetrable, seems next to impossible. With both of your help, I will have to decide if X is better for me than linux. It's between these two, simply because I am not a gamer. I am an application guy, with interests in the information highway which is our internet. Madden 2009 is all I need for games, and actually the physical games like hockey and others I participate in.

Thanks waiting for your response

[ditto]

I thank you both for your comments. My last concern wasn't answered. Will there be a time in the near future where we can browse the internet without malware attacks, zero?

Zero malware, virusus? No. I mean even on *nix systems, if the user executes a script that runs "sudo rm / -r" then its going to screw their system. Its the user who ends up running the scripts, not the person who wrote it. A computer could be the most secure thing ever, but its the user who makes the mistakes.

OSX and Linux?
Again its all about preference in what you want from your computer. Of course osx has the reputation of being perfect for video/photo editing and multimedia but if you arent using it to its full potential then its a really expensive tool to surf the web. Linux has its security, highly customizable, and lighter system requirements but you may have trouble having newer hardware work with linux. I have found that linux plays catch up with drivers.

What is nice about linux are the live cd's which allow you to run linux off of a cd.
Fedora-> http://download.fedo...0-i686-Live.iso
Ubuntu-> http://releases.ubun...esktop-i386.iso

You can also test drive Ubuntu using wubi:
http://wubi-installer.org/

[The Admiral]

That may be a little "technocolor," as you say. This is why, taken from the last source I quoted on Gizmodo.

A lot of that is because of the way permissions work in OS X vs. Windows. Basically, Unix-based systems are architected so that they require administrator privileges to modify the OS and are traditionally more strict in enforcing them. Critical areas are walled off from normal users—you see this when OS X asks for a password to install updates or change a system setting. A standard non-admin user account is restricted; bad software can't wreak much havoc at all without that password.

This is precisely what Vista's somewhat-maligned User Account Control attempts to replicate, limiting points of intrusion and requiring explicit user permission to get anywhere deep. On Windows, historically, the enforcement of these restrictions has been lax in the name of convenience.

This is just the way that the computer works - what programs can access what data. Viruses are, in most cases, pretending to be programs that need access to those critical parts of the system, and Windows isn't doing a very good job at keeping those critical areas safe. Right now, *nix (OSX and Linux) does better on that front than Vista, which is starting to catch up. Will there be a day when all critical data is walled off from viruses but not you or your programs? Maybe... but probably not. Definitely not worth waiting.

Edited by The Admiral, 09 December 2008 - 10:38 AM.