not entirely, more a function of it's multi user mode as default and repos. Those two things would have gone a long ways for early windows as well.

It's also worth noting that there are a lot of linux servers in the wild that are hacked serving shitty wordpress malware and spam email servers. Sure the desktop is fine, it's a very small piece of the pie, but the overall linux install ends up running bad software and poor configurations just like any OS.