but hold on a min... most people wont be checking email, or surfing the web, or anything major on a server... its kind of silly to be doing stuff like that... but if everyone was using it as a desktop OS, and was browsing, checking email, etc, there is more of a chance to attack it... yes, i agree, attacking servers running everything, but its a bit harder... and how, exactly, would you get the virus on to a server anyway?

> how, exactly, would you get the virus on to a server anyway

The kind of server we're talking about is, by definition, on the Internet, accepting connections from arbitrary people. It's entirely possible for a connection or a family of connections to bring down the server software, which often provides a way to subvert the OS while the machine is in the unusual state of the userspace server software being down. This provides the avenue.

> if everyone was using it as a desktop OS, and was browsing, checking email, etc, there is more of a chance to attack it

I think this falls down, too: Linux has never been a single monoculture. Instead, there's been broad de fact standardization of some things but not others, making it more difficult to target malware to it, as malware is, very often, intimately dependent on not only specific software, but specific configurations of software and specific versions of software.

Also, Windows has never had a trusted source of software comparable to distro repositories. This is probably partially due to antitrust rulings, and the fact Windows caught on and had its first major flowering before Internet access was especially cheap or reliable (consolidating usage patterns around a non-Internet shrinkwrap software model). This means it's hard to get all the software you need from trusted sources unless you act like a distro maintainer and decide for yourself who in specific you trust. (You can do that in Linux, too, but you don't have to.)

Finally, Windows users complain about UAC. Linux users don't complain about sudo. Applications under Linux know they won't be run as root and behave accordingly.