this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2025
51 points (98.1% liked)

Linux

59125 readers
1118 users here now

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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.

Rules

Related Communities

Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0

founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I know that Linux is more secure than Windows and normally doesn't need an antivirus, but know myself I'm gonna end up downloading something at some point from somewhere on the internet, and it would be good to be prepared. So, which antivirus would you recommend for Linux (Mint specifically) just to double up on security?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] notarobot@lemmy.zip 28 points 4 days ago (16 children)

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

[–] umbrella@lemmy.ml 3 points 4 days ago (11 children)

not necessarily, you would still be running the virus under wine, which will probably not work as intended.

[–] CrackedLinuxISO@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 points 4 days ago (4 children)

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.

[–] JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

If you run it through something like bottles offer a bit of protection in that respect?

[–] CrackedLinuxISO@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl 1 points 2 days ago

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).

load more comments (2 replies)
load more comments (8 replies)
load more comments (12 replies)