Hello bootdoc - have a think about this. In order to run anything it must be executable. If root was required to run executables, then users could not run email programs, browsers or anything else without being root.

This is obviously not the case. The point is that root has access to *everything* and so any executable being run by root has the same level of access.

An executable run by a user account generally has significantly less access, and so cannot do some of the basic things that malware likes to do - hide itself, and run independently of an account - and of course run as root itself.

This is not quite true. The eee pc does have a sudoers file, but is set that all users can run as sudo without a password. This is an important difference, as it means a few changes to the sudoers file can increase security. Having a free for all sudoers is not a good idea imo, and I would say that it is unlikely that the majority of eee pc users will do this.

Remember that a distribution is just a collection of applications that run on the GNU/Linux kernel. Yes, distribution will have its own setup and foibles but fundamentally they are the same, and in many cases a binary executable will run on many distributions without modification - particularly if it has no library dependencies by being self contained or using static linked binaries.