I have been hearing a lot lately about how Windows Vista is supposedly more secure overall than the popular Linux distros in the market today. After soaking this in and having a chance to think about it, I can come to only one conclusion: Microsoft must believe that vulnerabilities are worse than actual, in-motion exploits being used against exiting operating systems.

Operating system security is always a hotly contended subject, and last week Microsoft amped up the hype by claiming that Windows Vista and the soon-to-be-released 7 is the world’s most secure OS, beating both Linux and Mac OS X.

Here’s what Microsoft’s chief operating officer Kevin Turner had to say at the MidMarket CIO Summit last week:

In my last post, I showed how the vulnerability counts for Ubuntu Dapper LTS were lower than Windows Vista. However, I also mentioned that this should be used only to counter Microsoft FUD, and not as a measure of security. What, then, shows that Linux is actually more secure than Windows.

Microsoft has released a self-analysis of Vista that proclaims among other things that Vista has less found vulnerabilities than any other OS in their first year. Written by a member of their Trustworthy Computing group, this report exhibits more spin than the teacup ride at Disney Land.

Yes, that's right. A loyal Windows user of more than 15-years is throwing in the towel on Vista. You can read his story for why he finds Vista so annoying, but I'll sum it up for you: Vista sucks.

I have been using Vista for well over a year now (since Beta 1). Of course Vista is slow, its bloated (over 10x the size of XP), aero kills system performance (even though this should be done on the video card), networking is pathetically slow, etc etc. We all know Vista sucks.

But recently my blood has been set to a rolling boil by the fact that most of my games just don’t work in Vista. At all. Its so bad that out of spite I have decided to make a list of games that work better in Linux under Wine than in Vista. These are games that were originally written to run in Windows XP, are broken in Vista, but magically work in Linux.

"In contrast with Linux and even OS X, [Vista]’s expensive and bloated. Vista’s look may be shiny and attractive, but users aren’t being fooled by what their eyes are seeing. Everywhere you turn on the Internet, it’s easy to find another story of a loyal Windows user who after trying out Vista on their own machine has decided to downgrade to XP."

"If you believe Jeff Jones, Microsoft's security strategy director, then Vista is much more secure than XP, Mac OS X, and Linux."

Windows Vista was hit by significantly fewer publicly disclosed security flaws in its first year than Windows XP and open source rivals in their first years, according to a report from Microsoft.