Re: Even MORE RANSOMWARE !
Re: "Defection from Redmond based offerings will be rife... Just as soon as the computing population realises there are alternatives that cost NOTHING ! and run as well, if not better..."
I'd argue that the computing population is largely aware there are alternatives that cost nothing. Most of the population, rightly or wrong, don't care what OS their device is running as long as it runs the software they want relatively reliably and with minimal effort. They certainly won't want to have to download an Operating system, install it, set it up, find equivalents to the software they want to use (if what they want to use isn't available), and set that up.
As for Windows not being secure enough, I think you are going back a couple of decades.. Windows in 2001 wasn't secure, and the situation didn't really improve until halfway through the Vista development cycle, when Microsoft, being stung by hundreds of new vulns a week in XP, hired a proper security team, who went through most of their code looking for vulns.
Windows still has it's problems, but it *is* a lot more secure now than it was. Linux is, IMO, inherently more secure than Windows, even now, but it's not infallible. Nothing is. It's worth remembering that it being Open Source does NOT mean it's more secure, because it's entirely possible that someone will upload bad code into the repo for an open source project, and it gets missed by other maintainers, and it's also possible a security issue gets missed because there are only a few maintainers for the project, and they were all busy elsewhere. This happened with Open SSH a few years ago.
As for firmware level security, I think that will inevitably come to any OS, because there are trojans that can run at a lower level than the OS, thus hiding themselves from any detection systems run on the OS.