Linux Kernel provides more security techniques than Windows indeed, but they need to be used. To point out CVEs is kind of stupid. The Linux kernel never commited any entries to the CVE database for years, they started since February 2024 doing so, because they gave up on their opposition. They warned, if they do this now, the databases will get flooded with CVEs. Because in the kernel context, every bug counts as a security problem, if you look at it from the right perspective. This is a difference to Windows CVEs.

Of course this is great for those CVEs database providers because they now can sell their stuff happily.

What you need are not CVE entries for the Linux Kernel, but the latest supported Linux Kernel installed.

And srsly: Antivirus is snake oil. Using software with Administrator rights in Windows or even Linux, which parses every file, is fucking dangerous. It is usable on a mailserver, where the antivirus process is containerised or virtualized.

And what is the point with firewalls I read here? The most distros have firewalls enabled. When were they not there? Iptables was always there and I had to configure it, so I could allow or disallow incoming traffic. I almost never had to install it manually.

Edit:

Regarding CVEs, here the what Linux CNA tells:

Note, due to the layer at which the Linux kernel is in a system, almost any bug might be exploitable to compromise the security of the kernel, but the possibility of exploitation is often not evident when the bug is fixed. Because of this, the CVE assignment team is overly cautious and assign CVE numbers to any bugfix that they identify. This explains the seemingly large number of CVEs that are issued by the Linux kernel team.

Source

Any bugfix is a CVE