[mikewarot]

Strictly speaking, Linux, no matter what distribution, is insecure by design. Linus Torvalds's choice to ignore the lessons of Minux, and his instructor Andrew S. Tanenbaum resulted in short term gains that have cost us all in the long run.

With a microkernel system, you only have to really trust the kernel, and it's very small. You can build provably secure systems in this manner.

The last commonly available hardware/software combination that you could actually trust was an IBM PC/XT with dual floppy disks running MS-DOS. The write protection was enforced in hardware, so you could make and keep clean copies of the operating system.