From the phrasing of your question, I suspect we disagree on the answer to your theoretically rhetorical question. I don't care what people could or would like to audit with their free time, I care what people do audit with their actual time, generally because they are paid or have a financial motive to do.
Windows is fuzzed, analyzed, traffic analyzed, attacked, and picked apart inside AND outside Microsoft with higher frequency and greater depth than Linux is, regardless of which happens to be open source and theoretically easier to examine. If Microsoft were to inject malicious stuff into Windows it would be found and reported and exploited. There is too much money, too much exploit opportunity, and too much security researcher brand cred available to anyone who discovers even a hint of malicious behavior on Microsoft's part for it to go unnoticed and unreported.
And again, the point of the comment wasn't "Windows is secure" as nothing in tech is secure. The point was that someone who advocates wearing tinfoil hats around Windows to protect against the NSA while thinking Linux somehow gets a pass from those same bogeymen is not making a rational case for how to behave or what to fear.
Windows is fuzzed, analyzed, traffic analyzed, attacked, and picked apart inside AND outside Microsoft with higher frequency and greater depth than Linux is, regardless of which happens to be open source and theoretically easier to examine. If Microsoft were to inject malicious stuff into Windows it would be found and reported and exploited. There is too much money, too much exploit opportunity, and too much security researcher brand cred available to anyone who discovers even a hint of malicious behavior on Microsoft's part for it to go unnoticed and unreported.
And again, the point of the comment wasn't "Windows is secure" as nothing in tech is secure. The point was that someone who advocates wearing tinfoil hats around Windows to protect against the NSA while thinking Linux somehow gets a pass from those same bogeymen is not making a rational case for how to behave or what to fear.