Well, your definition of major differs from mine.
Well, it probably does. While I won't disagree that the absolute odds of a poorly trained user getting a Windows PC compromised are greater than the odds of the same poorly trained user managing to infect a Mac or Linux box... The worst infection is the one you don't know about. The fact of the matter is, the detection, analysis, and removal tools on Windows are years ahead of that on any other platform.
And, as for high-end targeted exploits... yikes. Exploited *nix boxes can live for years with no one noticing the little bug... That's very rare for Windows. Everyone uses it, and things that are amiss get noticed pretty quickly.
Perhaps but I'll take a decade of no problems over a regular cleaning ritual, every time, thank you very much.
There shouldn't be a "cleaning ritual." When an exploit occurs, it needs to be detected quickly, and dealt with promptly and harshly. If, like many people, you care so little about security that you just let everything go until a certain time you "clean up".... Then you're going to be a menace to any system you use.
Yes, I remember getting quite worried about viruses on the Amiga and running virus checkers and the like but never encountered one.
I ran into Lamer Exterminator, Saddam, and a few billion others that I don't remember, anymore. (I remember LE and Saddam because they were the most common on BBS around me.) Both cost me quite a few hours of scanning floppies. (Lamer Exterminator was before I ran virus checking and Saddam hit as a 0-day and no one knew what the hell it was for a couple weeks...) Ah, the fun times before the World Wide Web...
I remember Matt Sealey (some of you guys may also remember him) from AFB demonstrating how easy it was to infiltrate Amigas via YAM (I think - memory's a bit hazy) and managing to ruffle a few feathers at the same time.
Yeah.... Amiga/MOS are trivially easy to take over, as there is no security model, at all. Everything is administrator, so every exploit is a root exploit. Hell, you usually don't even need an exploit, as there's no security or authentication on the ARexx port, either. Absolutely any application is allowed to throw a command down the ARexx port of any other application. I'm quite sure there are easily exploitable holes in every software package out there. AmIRC, iBrowse, etc, all have them. Amigas were never intended to be hooked to a public network. That sort of thing just didn't happen back then. There is no security, whatsoever. It's just not part of the OS model. Just no one cares, because no one except the fringe use them.
