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!

  • moinmoin1OP
    15·
    5 months ago

    Thanks for your answer! Ublock Origin is a given in all my browsers. Web is not usable any more without.

    • Preflight_Tomato@lemm.eeEnglish
      7·
      5 months ago

      I read recently that ~90% lots of malware comes through ads, so it’s a really great security help as well.

        • Preflight_Tomato@lemm.eeEnglish
          2·
          5 months ago

          I read it from a Lemmy user who said they ran a business network and that’s the distribution they saw.

          Thanks for questioning that. I couldn’t find a wider trend number and it was a bit irresponsible of me to repeat it assuming it applied everywhere.