Mac OSX or Linux? Safer for web surfing?

I love my Win XP Laptop that I just bought a few months ago. It works fantasticly but with all of the security patching, spyware, virus', trojans etc... I feel that I must set up seperate computers in the house dedicated to web surfing. So which is better for web surfing in terms of beeing secure and trouble free?

Mac Mini OSX
vs.
PC with Linux

I like the idea of buying the Mac Mini so that I can start learning to use a Mac and the iLife stuff. However if the Linux stuff is safer then I might just go that route. Any ideas about which route I should take, and why?

Thanks in advance.

 

I use linux (mandrake) with Firefox and works fine.
Never unstable and never a virus ore what so ever.

 

I would say linux too. Rumor says when apple goes to x86, more exploits will be found in osX. Gotta love that open source

 

If all you care about is safe web surfing, then yes, I'd go with Linux also. In the 6 years of using Debian GNU/Linux, I have only gotten 1 virus running Linux, and I picked it up while running the Windows version of Kazaa in Wine (and the virus also ran under Wine).. http://www.winehq.com/

But MacOS X is sooo much prettier than Linux is.. I was able to customize my desktop in KDE (Linux) to be fairly awesome with glowing icons and fading text. But when I first started using Mac OS X Panther at school, I was completely blown away. If you use Windows XP and have never seen Quartz, it will probably blow you away. Heck, it blew me away and I had been using KDE which is MUCH better graphics wise than Windows XP. The hardware accelerated drop shadows on the bottom and right sides of windows in Mac OS X were the first things I noticed, and it was just incredible. Also, you can run KDE applications and Mac OS X applications at the same time in MacOS X.


http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/quartzextreme/
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/dashboard/
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/coreimage/
http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/expose/

*EDIT*
And if you REALLY REALLY care about web browsing then of course you wouldn't use Windows XP because the only browsers out there right now that are fully standards compliant are those that can pass the Acid2 test.
To the best of my knowledge, Safari for Mac OS X was the first browser, and then Apple allowed some of the source code in Safari to be put into Konqueror (KDE Browser for Linux).. So the new version of Konqueror passes the Acid2 as well..
http://www.webstandards.org/act/acid2/

The next version of Internet Explorer in Vista... Will still fail to pass the Acid2 test, because according to the MSDN newsletter sent out a while ago, passing the Acid2 test isn't a priority. Apparently following well-established and official standards of webpage formatting is not be a priority for Microsoft.

I'm betting that Opera 9 will be the first Windows XP compatible browser that will pass the Acid2 test...
We'll just have to wait and see.