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!
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.
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.