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!
Good answers here, I’d just add that there are occasional threats like the crazy xz utils backdoor or hardware vulns with Intel, etc., in a practical sense not much to really do there, so just practice good security habits and party on.