&quot;No matter what OS you choose it is vulnerable to viruses. You and I will agree that the odds are your Windows system is much more at risk by at least an order of magnitude. But the IA people who demanded that this system run antivirus are just as likely to demand that Linux run antivirus&quot;<p>That&#x27;s not true for what those systems should be really running which is separation kernel platforms. These isolated tasks in partitions using high-assurance kernels designed to not fail in every way you can think of and with almost no code to hit. The apps even donate their own resources for kernel calls. Interface is in untrusted VM that sends checked commands to real software running on isolated partition optionally on Ada or Java runtime for memory-safety. Anti-virus is not available and not necessary given the untrusted part is strongly contained &amp; the trusted part is memory safe.<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ghs.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;safety_critical&#x2F;integrity-do-178b.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ghs.com&#x2F;products&#x2F;safety_critical&#x2F;integrity-do-178...</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;os.inf.tu-dresden.de&#x2F;papers_ps&#x2F;nizza.pdf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;os.inf.tu-dresden.de&#x2F;papers_ps&#x2F;nizza.pdf</a><p>Just a matter of using right tools for the job. Any medical device using Windows or any other complex OS isn&#x27;t doing it right. Even OpenBSD would&#x27;ve been a better choice given it rarely is hacked, crashes, or needs updates. Antivirus software wouldn&#x27;t run as it&#x27;s not available for these. It would be a network appliance or something that didn&#x27;t affect running system.