A computer that is compromised with viruses is easily remedied. Anyone can just reinstall the operating system from the OEMs supplied OS installation media or the user can provide their own operating system. I don’t buy this argument that anti-virus leads to fewer people throwing their assets out. Furthermore, viruses do not affect the underlying hardware, which is what people would be throwing away. The economics don’t make sense, why would an individual dispose of an asset they bought with their personal money when there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with the part of the asset that was purchased?
"Anyone can just reinstall the operating system from the OEMs supplied OS installation media or the user can provide their own operating system."
A careful examination of who that "anyone" is will reveal that as "anyone"s go, it's not very "anyone". It's certainly less than 50% comfortable doing that, and even less willing (e.g., I know how but that doesn't mean I want to).
> … and they think that malware can harm their computer.
To be fair, it actually can — there’s plenty of writable flash on motherboards and in peripherals where malware could persist across OS reinstallation.
I think that in the days before good windows security, it's true that more people threw out their assets due to malware. I've seen plenty of family members do it, reinstalling an operating system is sadly not something "anyone" can do.
It doesn't make sense to throw hardware out because of some software, but most don't have such a distinction.
> I think that in the days before good windows security,
"Before"‽ Windows still sets every file as executable by default (just an example). If it had good security you wouldn't need anti-malware tools always running in the background looking for stuff that has already broken through (to some extent). Basically, Windows security has been and probably always will be absolute garbage.
A big reason why Microsoft won't (and can't, really) fix the security of Windows is backwards compatibility... If they fixed the "everything is executable by default" problem it would 100% for sure break a ton of stuff.
The code base for Windows is both old and enormous. They don't employ enough developers to constantly review and re-write all that code all of the time. Most of it--even today's Windows 10 core code--was written at a time when Microsoft didn't really give a rat's ass about security.
Just look at the past few years of Windows 10 vulnerabilities:
Looking at last year, in 2021 Ubuntu had 29 CVE-listed vulnerabilities, four of which were "code execution" (the worst).
In that same period Windows 10 had 485 CVE-listed vulnerabilities, 112 of which were "code execution"!
Now consider for a moment that the scope of Canonical/Ubuntu CVE list includes vastly more software than what comes with Windows. I just looked (Ubuntu 21.04) and there's 6,080 packages in Ubuntu's "main" software repository which is what's in scope for those CVEs (I'm pretty sure anyway).
Whereas the scope of Windows 10 is just what comes with the OS which isn't much! If you drill down into the Windows 10 code execution vulnerabilities you'll see that it's all in the core stuff that comes with Windows like the print spooler, media services libraries, remote desktop, file system, etc. It's not obscure extras like bundled games or the snip tool or whatever.
> OEMs supplied OS installation media or the user can provide their own operating system
I haven't received install media of any kind from an OEM in over a decade. Commonly they're using a hidden disk partition to reinstall the OS. This can just as easily be compromised as the boot partition. So "just reinstall" skips a number of laborious or impractical steps.
> I don’t buy this argument that anti-virus leads to fewer people throwing their assets out
Just because you think people shouldn't behave a certain way doesn't necessarily mean they don't behave that way, though. There are definitely people out there who toss their laptops when they get cluttered with malware
