It would, however, make it a bit more difficult. Windows has more valid attack vectors than Unix-like systems do. Windows simply has more known vulnerabilities. It's not impossible to break into a Unix-like system, but for a dedicated attacker, it's almost trivial to break into a Windows environment. I can send someone an EXE that they can double click and install and I'm in. On Linux, that's much more rare of an occurrence. Try convincing someone to compile your malware from source...

> I can send someone an EXE that they can double click and install and I'm in. On Linux, that's much more rare of an occurrence.

I can do that with linux binaries too? The difference is that a Windows user is more likely to install untrusted software.

You can not get a Linux executable from the network. You can only give a file execution permission after it's local.

True it's possible. Which is why I said it's not impossible. But it's very rare to find Linux binaries, especially Linux binaries that are not distro-specific. It's much harder to throw an infected binary at a user when you need to know more about them than "they run Windows 7".

I wonder if I post on HN/proggit about my cool new ruby project, and start it off with curl | sh, but put something malicious, how many people will blindly install it?

The fact that most Windows users run as Administrator doesn't help. Using root in Unix-like systems is frowned upon unless absolutely necessary is one of the basic security advantages Unix-like systems have.

That hasn't been true for the vast majority Enterprise environments for the last decade or so, and even before for places which dumped the the Windows 9x lineage earlier.

Even home users on anything beyond XP rarely run with default Administrator privileges anymore, although they're still a click away for most users, through UAC.

Curiously enough, while Linux power users frown upon running as root, in Windows it's usually the power users who choose to disable UAC, although it's less bothersome than sudo (no password needed).

Security is all about raising the bar. If we could get every single machine/device to "only be breached through targeted attacks", I think that would be quite good.