A text editor is probably the very thing for which you’re most likely to find an exact, like-for-like replacement (or maybe even a cross-platform port) in Linux. *nix people LOVE text editors - there are oodles of them.
Which one are you talking about anyway?
It’s obscurity that makes malware authors not bother trying, but that’s not the same thing.
It’s foolish to imagine that any operating system can be made invulnerable, but some of the security of Linux comes from the ‘baked in’ nature of the privilege model.
Up until Vista, Windows used an ‘assume-friendly’ admin privilege model. Linux uses ‘assume-hostile’.
That is, in Windows, you could do everything, unless something explicitly prevented you, whereas in Linux, you can’t do anything until you are explicitly granted permission.
This changed in Vista with UAC, but many Windows users considered it such an imposition that they just turned it off.
I hate to nitpick, but there are plenty of executable commands (that can cause catastrophic system damage) in Win 7 that do not require any sort of privilege escalation, even with the UAC turned all the way up. The UAC is not even remotely similar to the baked-in sudo security model of Linux, it’s more like spritzed-on.
Nitpick appreciated (I think it reinforces my point).