The idea that ElementaryOS is less likely to steal your coins than Windows or OS X is simply laughable.
At least with Linux we have thousands of open source developers keeping an eye on things, chances are much higher that an issue would be caught with Linux since Windows is closed source.
A bit of pithy sarcasm for your morning: Those thousands of eyes worked so well with OpenSSL, didn’t it?
Those eyes are less vigilant than you might think, especially when the eyes aren’t being paid to monitor a particular chunk of code.
That there have been two major OpenSSL security fumbles (first was the Debian OpenSSL fiasco, second Heartbleed) sort of suggests that the value of "many eyes" for ensuring security is vastly overrated.
And not to mention that Windows - the explicitly called out alternative from this article - makes their source available for security companies (as well as general developers who sign up for their MSDN program).
Why? Heartbleed was discovered by fuzzing the compiled binaries, not by eyeballing the source code.
Nothing prevents you from performing the exact same research on proprietary software.
That’s all utterly irrelevant when ElementaryOS doesn’t even offer reproducible builds.
Besides, source code access doesn’t make finding bugs much easier. Usually you’ll be auditing binaries anyway.
But in any case, if you care about security, you have a hardware wallet and store the seed somewhere secure.
That isn't even counting the hardware stack underneath your kernel. What parts of your machine were manufactured in China? Is Intel IME trustworthy? What about all those firmware blobs?
I’m sorry, but it’s really obvious that you don’t really know what you’re talking about.
Very few commits are looked at by more than a handful of people. If you’ve ever had any involvement in FOSS development you must know this.
However I think Linux's security is partly an artifact of a more techie user base. For a non-technical or too busy to be technical user I would say Apple offers the best security out of the box.
Both Linux and Mac users have been hit with ransomware.
In terms of the security of the operating system itself, Windows may well be more secure than Linux. Many Windows applications, however, are going to be much less secure than the OS--although it's not like Linux applications are stellar in this regard as well (e.g., Docker).
I believe the latter is true; I've seen some incredibly intelligent individuals fall victim to shady crap.
We (as in the entire software development community) need to lower that bar.
>Windows may well be more secure than Linux
This is very obviously the case if you look into the deployed exploit mitigation technologies.
That is, Windows is a target that's an order of magnitude bigger - of course there will be more attacks.
The kernel is auditable...maybe, possibly, theoretically, to a point - but what good is a kernel, when there's unauditable firmware between the OS and the hardware?