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Microsoft abusing its update mechanism to pushing crap is nothing new, but downright refusing updates ins't the answer either.
And yet, Windows updates are a bigger threat to me than malware.
At least you can be careful about the rest with adblocking, sandboxing and being irrelevant enough to not make your machine a target for anyone competent, which gives you a pretty great chance at avoiding them. If you keep built-in malware (and in recent versions, also spyware) running, then getting screwed by it is a certainty. Personally, I'll take my chances and I think the average HN user would not have any problems doing this, but I wouldn't really recommend this approach to someone that's not tech savvy. I'd give them a Chromebook instead.
That maybe used to be a thing, but isn't anymore really: There only needs to be a single, unpatched vulnerability in your network stack, the multitude of devices around you, whether at home, work, or in a cafe, none of which you control, might exploit.
And one more little piece of trivia; high levels of expertise usually come with increased negligence on the basics, because you're less careful. This affects pilots and nerds alike; just think of Ross Ulbricht.
Good luck :)
It's always one unlikely thing. I don't think living in such paranoia is a life worth living tbh. Some small risks you just accept to live normally, and 99.9% of the time it'll be alright. With 2FA and other multi device safeguards the risk is acceptable. Frankly authentication for things has gotten so bloated that even the actual user has a hard time logging into things these days.
Frankly I'm more worried about losing or damaging my phone, if that happens then I'm far more screwed and it's a risk we all accept every day. I keep it in aluminium armour to de-risk :)
Linux oldheads could've told you this would happen before the project was even created. We solved package management and dependencies in the 90s and no one has improved on it since. Just stick with stuff in your distro's repos. If it's not in the repos, don't use it. Problems gone.
Edit: Or use Windows binaries with your distro-provided Wine. Win32 is the only stable user-level Linux API.
NixOS because of its generations has been extremely stable for me for years.
Have an issue? Reboot, select yesterdays generation (similar to but better than restore point), and keep working.