@KuroeNekoDemon @GossiTheDog Feeling secure and being secure are fairly different.

(By the way, if you like, you can configure your Windows user so you'll need to input credentials to escalate. Very few people configure Windows this way outside of corporate domains because, while there's not a huge improvement in security, there's a definite loss in usability.)

UAC impacted the malware ecosystem pretty significantly. A lot of malware moved to running without privilege, thus not triggering a UAC prompt. There's plenty that malware can do, running as your user, without escalating to admin/root.

But Windows (and MacOS, later) has another layer of protection here -- binary signing. If that sneaky binary doesn't have a valid Authenticode signature, you're going to get blocked from running it or, at least, you're going to have to jump through hoops to get it to execute. Linux (and ELF binaries in general) has no similar protection that I'm aware of.

And that's just scratching the surface of the security stuff in Win10/11. So, the answer to your question is "Around Vista, and definitely by Windows 10".