796
FTC bans antivirus giant Avast from selling its users' browsing data to advertisers
(techcrunch.com)
this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2024
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Linux users keep saying you don't need antivirus on Linux and that Linux is more secure and safe. This intrigues me, as I'm moving to Linux, but I never hear any technical reasons as to why this would be. All I see is "there are no viruses because it's a small platform". That's not an argument for the security of the platform so I'm curious to know if there are any technical reasons Linux would be more secure. Every now and then I read about some malware for Linux, so they do definitely exist.
There's little technical reason, at least no security features were ever tested on the scale Windows is every day.
The real reason is nobody bothers to target Linux desktop users because there's dozens of us (dozens!) while there's billions of Windows users. It's about efficiently spending your money and time while investing into crime.
between smartphones replacing desktop PCs and mac computers, I doubt that there's "billions" of windows users left in reality.
240 million PCs were shipped last year, with about 10% being Apple. A negligible number run Linux. If we assume 5 years average life, that's still easily a billion active Windows devices.
That said, devices may not be the best metric. You mentioned users, which may use many devices. For instance, I use a Windows laptop at work, Windows desktop at home, Android on my phone.
I would use web server metrics, which are an approximate indicator of time spent on each OS.
I believe the yearly tally from some company aggregating website traffic came out a few months back and linux had climbed over 4% of desktop usage. Linux gamers have outnumbered mac users on steam for close to a year now.
As I said, I took issue with the plural in billionS :) that typically implies "more than two" when it's likely to be closer to 1.
poor you :)