It has to be, Otherwise Windows would have succumb to microsoft's antisecure culture by now.

It is fucking horrible with false positives though. RIP if you have a Kali ISO sitting on one of your drives.

That and the Antimalware service executable gets hung up and chugs 30-50% of your CPU and RAM and won't stop.

It's way too reliant on their cloud infrastructure though, causing it to detect and react to malware slower than other solutions and it turns to shit the second the network disconnects. The PC security channel on YouTube has some good analysis of it.

💯

I almost opted to move my parents to use Linux instead of Windows because of how much time I was spending on fixing the malware and viruses they'd get. Then enter Windows Defender.

Now all I have to deal with is when they get the occasional scam call... "Yes, it's Bob from Microsoft, you need to wire us $900 to fix a virus."

Windows ME was the last edition to make this assumption. NT was never like that.

This is Linuxmemes, what did you expect?

Up-to-date knowledge of other systems? lol

Probably pre-SP2 for that matter.

Hey cut it out we're trying to circle jerk here

macOS and Linux have additional security features at a system level, on Linux most software comes through controlled repositories or sandboxed flatpaks. There are also tons of multi million dollar companies that constantly try to find and fix kernel level vulnerabilities and a distro like Debian, which is very popular for servers, has had less major vulnerabilities than windows 7 throughout its entire lifecycle and Debian exists for other 30 years. So I’d say Linux is would have a few less (different) attacks

Dang, a post from 1999!

Yeah it literally pops a screen sized warning when anything tries to run as admin. Linux is very vulnerable as well. Hackers are just really good at what they do.

i am going to turn your skull into pasta

Because if you're gonna use an antivirus, Defender does just fine.

They all more or less use the same viral signature database and definitions, and are mostly feature-matched with each other. Why look beyond what your computer came with unless you're installing something integrated with an RMM tool?

Because, in addition to the other valid points raised, modern "Anti"-Virus Software is often worse than an actual Virus.

There are way too many pop ups, the menus are confusing and constantly try to upsell you. If you want to remove the damn thing usually it doesn't work, or doesn't work completely, or has a separate auto-updater that reinstalls it after the next boot.

False positives screw you over good (Kaspersky killed the Ethernet Network on a buddy's PC. He couldn't use the internet on it until he managed to remove that piece of shit from his system completey) and are not less frequent than with Windows Defender but certainly more annoying (see above example)

If you paid a subscription getting rid of that is a pain as well (BitDefender tried to scam me out of 130€ by sending the billing notif to an email address they shouldn't even have anymore)

Not all of them are shit like that but most are so sticking with the preinstalled Windows Defender that does 95% of the alternatives results in users having a better experience.

Because defender has an amazing malware detection rate with few false positives.

Much better than even the paid antiviruses like McAfee and Norton.

Avast used to be good, but then it started to show ads every day.

Plus, Defender uses close to no resources to run.

but i wanna play reversi

It takes a hash.

I would argue most Linux users have no clue they're Linux users.

I think they're probably just young and enthusiastic. I was like that about linux 20 years ago when I had the energy for it.