this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2025
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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That is an old myth. There are less viruses for Linux because there are less users. But if you do things like install priated games, you have the same risk as on windows
Thank you. I lived through the "Macs can't get viruses" bullshit. Try being a teacher in a school with 200 Macs and find out how real that claim is. Yeeeeesh lol... two weeks after fresh imaging and new semester starting 50% of the machines would be completely b0rked
not necessarily, you would still be running the virus under wine, which will probably not work as intended.
Wine is not an emulator. It's not sandboxed either. If you can do it as a user, a program running in wine can do it too.
There's nothing stopping a piece of malware from crawling your disk for sensitive information, or encrypting your files for ransom.
If you run it through something like bottles offer a bit of protection in that respect?
I wouldn't think so. Isn't bottles just an easier way to manage wine prefixes? If so, it doesn't do anything to hide your Linux system from the executable.
Wine prefixes are not sandboxes. They are a way to separate the windows-level configuration for different programs (eg env vars, or drivers, etc).
Wine is a translation layer between a compiled windows binary and your Linux syscalls/libraries/device drivers/etc, nothing more.
On the bottles website, it says that the bottles are sandboxes. It has a full subsystem container for each program that is isolated from the main system (according to them I guess).
To prove your point even more, WannaCrypt has a platinum rating on WineHQ.
Pirated ganes may contain linux viruses. No need for wine
do they tho
If they don't today I'm sure steam deck will help encourage.
agreed. increased linux market share will come with some disadvantages.
nothing we won't be able to surmount, we have already been building solutions.
Hard disagree - the point is a decade ago there wasn't enough Linux market share for bad actors to target Linux. Proton is a compatibility layer, which while technically being a sandbox, it isn't designed around security the way a browser sandbox is. It would not be hard for a virus embedded in a made-for-windows program to identify that it's actually a proton sandbox, then deploy a Linux-specific payload (assuming the malware designer gave it some forethought for that situation). Heck - there's plenty of viruses that do their work in scripting languages that don't care what OS you're running on.
we might see such malware one day, but i don't think this has ever been done in the wild just yet.
Brodie Robertson made a video about malware which pretends to be a pdf but is actually just an executable with a
.pdffile extension. So if you double click it, you get pwnd. I think some desktop environments ask you for confirmation before running such thing but I would not count on it.So we even have an example of Linux specific malware.
It shouldn't even be able to run it, because the x permission bit is missing. As far as I know binaries can't include icons on linux, so it would look different too.
Nope, the permission bit is preserved if you share the pdf in an archive like zip. The "looks different" won't help. There is always at least a single user who accidentally falls for a trap, which looks like an obvious trap to others.