Linux is

Let me explain some stuff about linux. First of all, about the safety, Linux is structured in a such way that the system is relatively safer than windows, and limiting the control of program (compared to your control) over your system. That's what have prevented Linux from the Virus explosion that happened for windows.
But away from safety, personally I don't use linux because of safety, I use it for 2 exact reasons, "Stability" and "Control" over my OWN hardware :D. That's what windows lacks generally. We could get into details here, if you'd like. There's a lot of examples where you don't have control over your own hardware in windows. For linux, in most cases, this doesn't happen at all. For example, once I had a couple of my friends over in my room, and we all needed internet access... I was able within 10 minutes to turn my laptop to a wireless router. To be honest, this worked for may b 6 months and they did some changes to the driver that made problems. This is control over my hardware. Talking about drivers, one of the main issues with linux, in my opinion is the quality as well as the availability of drivers for the various hardware. The hardware manufacturers are the one to blame for these problems. The usual scenario is that the manufacture makes the hardware and only provides drivers for windows, then the linux programmers have to reverse-engineer the device and write drivers for it. This solution provides a working driver, but sometimes not supporting the full functionality of the hardware. The hardware manufacturers could release the APIs for their devices and thousands of linux programmers would be more than happy to develop the drivers. OR they could write linux drivers for their own hardware as they do for windows, by the way, NVidia started with the second option.
Also, did you know that a lot of the very famous programs were first developed for linux.. like firefox, thunderbird, apache web server, sqlite and a lot of other software.

About stability, we should take a look at the servers field, where stability and reliability (uptime) is the key issue. http://news.netcraft.com/archives/web_server_survey.html take a look here... Linux software (apache) takes more than half the market share for web servers.

One last thing, if we judge linux before really trying it for a relatively long amount of time, our judgment will will biased. Because the linux things will be really hard and annoying, and the tasks will seem long and complex.. just as they seemed when we started using windows.. we just need to get used to it first, and then judge the difference.

Myself, I used windows form 1998 - 2006 and linux 2006 - current. If, at least for my own needs, windows was a better operating system, I wouldn't have made the switch or I would have switched back.

Give it some thoughts, and may be if you'd like, give it a try.

Andrew Boktor