this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2024
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Anti Malware with Linux (feddit.org)
submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Hello! Sorry maybe for this beginners-question: do I need dedicated anti-virus / anti-malware software for my Linux System?

I'm not using my laptop for anything shady: no filesharing, no pirating, etc. Just the usual boring bit of work or streaming or surfing the web. Do I need dedicated safety measures? Like ClamAV for example? I read a bit about it but there where mixed messages, where people said it's not needed.

I'm running Linux Mint and Cinnamon on a laptop since a few months and couldn't be happier with an operating system. Everything works fine and until now I had no trouble at all (besides this little annoying bug, where my touchpad gets randomly set to "deactivated", but this really is a minor issue and maybe just a "stupid user"-Problem).

Before I suffered through decades of windows. But no more!

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I've seen good answers here but I just wanted to chime in as I'm a newer Linux user and as I'm learning more from running Fedora as my daily driver instead of Windows, I'm learning a lot and hope to help others learn as well.

Typically, most common software that you want to use will be in the repo for your distro or in a flatpak of some kind. If you're downloading from your distributions repo, your typically not going to encounter viruses. Flatpaks are also generally safe as theyre sandboxed so the interactions they have with your system are generally read only.

That said, still use caution. Don't run commands that you find online unless you know what they do, use ublock like you mentioned you already do, only download software from trusted sources and use the checksum to verify the files integrity and safety.

From the sound of it, you're already doing what you should be, just wanted to add this if there were any other very new users with similar concerns about viruses.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Flatpaks often have write access to the home directory. The sandbox is more about convenience/portability than security IMO. You are definitely right to suggest caution. One should only use Flatpaks that come from trusted sources.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Yea thats part of the reason I said generally. As I said, newer to linux and still learning but flatpaks can be more secure because they are sandboxed is my understanding.

That said, you're not wrong to point it out. Sandboxes arent the be all end all to security of course. Any security is defeated if the end user doesn't use logic and practice saftey when it comes to downloading any software.