Online safety and security

[jokerl90]

I'm thinking of doing a dual boot install of winxp home for gaming and Kubuntu 8.10 for everything else. Everything else is not really much, I pay a half dozen bills online every month, sometimes transfer funds between checking and savings, read forums, and even look at the naked ladies of the newsgroups. I don't think of myself as a "power user". My main use of a computer is for online gaming.
A week or so ago I installed a dual boot on a spare e-machine I have , just to see how it works. I would like to do this on my main computer, but I'm a little bit concerned about the security issues. I have been doing searches on this forum about the subject, it seems that linux is basically safer that winxp.
Considering my above described usage, would a dual boot system be safe and practical? Any advise would be much appreciated.

PS: I can't get past the irony of this. I sit here and type this on a winxp system behind a firewall in my modem, and have winxp firewall behind that, and I have Avg Free, Spyware Doctor, Ad-Aware, Spybot and a-squared Free on my desktop. With a linux system I probably would not need all that. Have I been brainwashed by microsoft to be nervous without it

[karlyguy]

Re: Online safety and security

Im also a huge noob to world of linux, so im not an authority on the subject, but i understand that there is no spyware \ malware \ viruses for Linux for 2 reasons.
Open Source Code means that if anyone with the know how can write code to improve the system, the result is that there are thousands of linux programmers compared to Windows dozens of programmers (hundred maybe?), and they want to make a safe & secure system that viruses cannot infect, and have been successful at this.
Also there are not nearly as many users for Linux, couple hundred thousand, compared to Windows users, in the millions. Majority of Windows users are not above average in computer knowledge, while the majority of Linux users are above average (after all they figured out what is an OS, that there are other OS' available, and installed another OS = far more advanced than most Windows users). Thus, Its far more profitable for malware \ adware \ virus makers to target Windows users, take advantage of less knowledgeable people and millions of them. No profit in trying to take on Linux users who would just upgrade their open source code to deny the malware intrusion.
although i suppose there could be a spyware \ virus that is designed for linux for people gullible enough to run a command like "sudo install X" without knowing what they are doing.

[jokerl90]

Re: Online safety and security

Thanks for the reply! I took the plunge today and reinstalled winxp and installed kubuntu dual boot. Now for the learning curve! lol