If you actually dig deeper into the Linux security topic, you’d find out that Linux is actually not very secure. GrapheneOS developers made quite a lot of posts on what Linux distros (and the kernel) are missing in terms of security. A lot of “Linux security and the lack of viruses” rides on the waves of “there is hardly any point of creating malware for a system with such a small user base, plus you have to consider the fact that people knowledgeable enough just to install a Linux distro would be a bit more careful about their computers than the average Joe”.
there is hardly any point of creating malware for a system with such a small user base
Actually the whole world runs on linux, Windows is mostly the low level consumer end.
Which makes your argument true for a certain segment of malware (the cheap low tech stuff more akin to scams etc targeting people en mass but expected to have a low return), but not actually for the parts where the money is that justify elaborate malware and hacks.
The internet runs on linux.
(Webservers, some network equipment, monitoring servers, NAS, DNS, … lots of services can be setup and ran for free on linux. ((Companies like free)))
A lot of companies stuff also runs on linux when it’s not free, just so they can avoid having to manage the hardware side… see: Google Cloud, AWS, Azure etc.
The amount of companies having their whole infrastructure run by one of the big cloud services on linux servers nowadays is far too high to make a serious argument of “linux is only secure because it’s irrelevant and no one cares to break it”.
