All of the above is true, You still have to be careful regardless of the OS based on the sites you visit. It is like going to the rough side of town with money hanging out of your pocket. If you like to visit a smut site or some other normally bad website you are asking for trouble, but is it highly unlikey you are going to see a keyboard logging trogan unless of course you want to put that one on yourself and give the root password freely out for everyone to have. But one thing people are not going to send an email that is going to corrupt the Kernal as in windows. Nothing is 100 % safe but it sure is far "safer" by leaps and bounds. Especially those who don't keep their anti virus software up to date on windows, or like to pass around humorus emails with embedded spyware. I do not know of a single person who is running unbuntu that had problems with either virus or spyware. Nor do I know any at the university that have been using it since it came out. If a person is careless, regardless of the OS they can have problems but it is sure better technically to do your work with this then Vista I think, And most CS people would agree