I know this might open a can of worms, but why is Linux more secure than Windows out of the box? Is it because Linux is open source?
The biggest factor - out of box - is that Gnu/Linux is less popular OS. Secondary factor is that built-in repositories with packages (which includes majority of apps) contains centralized security updates. In Windows you have only updates to OS and other Microsoft apps, but not for third-party apps. Gnu/Linux technologically can be more secure, but you need to put some work to use Mandatory Access Control, carefully crafted firewall rules and so on, fine selection of user-space apps, so technologically it is not more secure out of box. There is also another noun: privacy. Privacy is something different than security. Most Gnu/Linux distros does not send telemetry data to it's developers. So even if they are only slightly more secure, they are considerably more private.
Also, they're generally free, so there's no money trail. And they run on generic hardware, so there's less likely to be a useful money trail for that, either. So you can mitigate impacts of telemetry.
This. I run Ubuntu LTS on my main PC simply because of the vastly better privacy as compared to the now spayware Windows 10.
