By and large, competently managing your system is far more important than getting the latest greatest updates for everything every five minutes or-else-you'll-die. Security is not first-one-through-the-door wins, Linux has layers of it, many of them.

It's not often I have cause to quote bash.org on this forum. Thanks for the opportunity.
I have been hacked precisely once, and that only because I was idiotic enough to have a user "testuser" with the password "testuser". The testuser account didn't have su or sudo access, meaning they couldn't get out of the highly limited testuser account, so the damage was almost nonexistent, and all fixed within three commands:

Code:

killall -9 --user testuser
find / -user testuser -exec rm '{}' ';'
userdel testuser

Linux doesn't have malware or spyware or viruses as you know them. Getting exploited to the point where root access is compromised is extremely rare on a properly managed system; more likely to happen is someone finding an exploit in one of your PHP scripts on your webserver and using it to get at files or databases you don't want them to, or breaking into a limited account, downloading a kit, and trying to bruteforce not just your own passwords but those of any other computers it can find over ssh, or copy-pasting an innocent-looking piece of shell code from a "helpful friend" who wants to take the snotty linux user down a peg, or having your computer crash down to a raw command prompt after another "helpful friend" tries to hotrod your system for you. Both those last two happened to a friend of mine... I still shake my head at what some people will do to others, at least it taught her caution real fast. Depends on what you want. There's so many kinds because there's so many different ways people want to use it. Ubuntu is the best imitation of Windows you'll find in a linux distro, and among the best hardware detection too, but it's a resource pig, and you won't learn much using it. linuxprinting.org

Well said. Linux is horrible at being Windows, but very good at being Linux. Expect to relearn everything -- or, rather, relearn some things, and explore lots of brand-new things.