A trade secret proprietary and obfuscated operating system from an organization known to collude with the government
Or
Code I have read in part, and know others read, and stand to believe that among all of us using those with the money or time would also audit
Given, we are all on predominantly x86 computers with proprietary obfuscated control processors that can seize control of the system and do whatever they are told by the manufacturer / those the manufacturer gives access to, so the security is in general a whiff.
Or more generally, don't use Linux for a false sense of security, because the security holes go much, much deeper than just the kernel and whats running on top of it, and Linux itself is nothing outstanding from a security architectural standpoint.
From the phrasing of your question, I suspect we disagree on the answer to your theoretically rhetorical question. I don't care what people could or would like to audit with their free time, I care what people do audit with their actual time, generally because they are paid or have a financial motive to do.
Windows is fuzzed, analyzed, traffic analyzed, attacked, and picked apart inside AND outside Microsoft with higher frequency and greater depth than Linux is, regardless of which happens to be open source and theoretically easier to examine. If Microsoft were to inject malicious stuff into Windows it would be found and reported and exploited. There is too much money, too much exploit opportunity, and too much security researcher brand cred available to anyone who discovers even a hint of malicious behavior on Microsoft's part for it to go unnoticed and unreported.
And again, the point of the comment wasn't "Windows is secure" as nothing in tech is secure. The point was that someone who advocates wearing tinfoil hats around Windows to protect against the NSA while thinking Linux somehow gets a pass from those same bogeymen is not making a rational case for how to behave or what to fear.
A trade secret proprietary and obfuscated operating system from an organization known to collude with the government
Or
Code I have read in part, and know others read, and stand to believe that among all of us using those with the money or time would also audit
Given, we are all on predominantly x86 computers with proprietary obfuscated control processors that can seize control of the system and do whatever they are told by the manufacturer / those the manufacturer gives access to, so the security is in general a whiff.
Or more generally, don't use Linux for a false sense of security, because the security holes go much, much deeper than just the kernel and whats running on top of it, and Linux itself is nothing outstanding from a security architectural standpoint.