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FTC bans antivirus giant Avast from selling its users' browsing data to advertisers
(techcrunch.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
There's little technical reason, at least no security features were ever tested on the scale Windows is every day.
The real reason is nobody bothers to target Linux desktop users because there's dozens of us (dozens!) while there's billions of Windows users. It's about efficiently spending your money and time while investing into crime.
between smartphones replacing desktop PCs and mac computers, I doubt that there's "billions" of windows users left in reality.
don't forget all the office drones, who are also the main target of scammers
I didn't, but I considering the world's workforce is around 3 1/2 billion people, and that in the developed world, the percentage of office jobs is around or below 50%, however the majority of the world's work force live in underdeveloped parts of the world, I would estimate the total number of worldwide office workspaces to be significantly below a billion. And - even the number Microsoft themselves claim, appears to be only 1.5 billion total per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems - with this particular quote in the article (emphasis by me):
240 million PCs were shipped last year, with about 10% being Apple. A negligible number run Linux. If we assume 5 years average life, that's still easily a billion active Windows devices.
That said, devices may not be the best metric. You mentioned users, which may use many devices. For instance, I use a Windows laptop at work, Windows desktop at home, Android on my phone.
I would use web server metrics, which are an approximate indicator of time spent on each OS.
I believe the yearly tally from some company aggregating website traffic came out a few months back and linux had climbed over 4% of desktop usage. Linux gamers have outnumbered mac users on steam for close to a year now.
As I said, I took issue with the plural in billionS :) that typically implies "more than two" when it's likely to be closer to 1.
poor you :)