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Linux Mint, forget windows or mac, no infections or crashing

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loveasianwomen
Rookie Scribe
After infecting my laptop with some bit of malware yet again (10yrs ago) I said "thats it" and downloaded a copy of linux mint. At the time I burned it to a cd and booted it without changing my current winblowz system. It was a bit slower running from the cd but I got a feel of how it worked and loooked. Without changing the computer. You can also burn a copy to a flash drive now days. Just boot to usb.

I decided to dual boot my system and installed a copy of mint side by side with windows. Mint was far superior in most ways and a bit lacking in others. The free version of office was a bit different and clunky. The photo editing gimp program was a learning curve. I was able to continue using thunderbird for email so that was a win.

BUT

On my 8yr old laptop linux mint screamed! It booted in 8 seconds (compared to windows 7 near 1 minute boot time). I could surf to any porn site and NOT get infected. I could open mail and not get infected. Infact I dont even have an antivirus on my system and have not for 10yrs with not a single infection or issue!

I really like the speed on linux. There are many different versions of linux like Ubuntu, Debian, etc. I chose mint because it looked like windows and made the conversion easier.

There is a site called distrowatch that you can view each version. You can also go to each linux website and view screenshots. If you want to try it just down load a iso of the version you want and use a usb boot loader to install a bootable copy to the flash drive. Then boot your computer with it plugged in. You might have to change the bios settings if it doesnt detect.

I use the cinnamon desktop.

https://linuxmint.com/screenshots.php
noll
"insensitive prick!" – Danielle Algo
Quote by loveasianwomen
Infact I dont even have an antivirus on my system and have not for 10yrs with not a single infection or issue!


How can you be so sure about not having had an infection then?


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scottob1234
Active Ink Slinger
Quote by noll


How can you be so sure about not having had an infection then?


There would be open source warts..
Unknown User
Infection chances on windows is much higher than that on Linux. Till date, I've not come across anyone who complained about virus problem on Linux.
noll
"insensitive prick!" – Danielle Algo
Quote by The_reader94
Infection chances on windows is much higher than that on Linux. Till date, I've not come across anyone who complained about virus problem on Linux.


True. But without a virus scanner you might not know your computer is infected and I bet many Linux users, and even macOS users, don't have virus scanners installed on their systems. Perhaps the virus is still waiting for a signal that'll trigger its purpose, or it only uses your computer to infect other machines as yours may not be the target.


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kathy812
Advanced Wordsmith
no need to worry about viruses on mint,because of all the updates.i had a scanner for a while.3500+ viruses.never mattered
WannabeWordsmith
Writius Eroticus
I don't run a virus scanner on any machine I own. Even Windows. Slows the system too much, to the degree that I don't really know what's going on so can't get a "feel" for the machine's default responsiveness. Thus if something was to hit, undetected by the scanner, or if I let it through by mistake - for example, by saying 'ok' to a warning popup that I meant to reject - I might not notice the intrusion, since the machine's responsiveness is too unpredictable with scanner software running.

Viruses and such like have to do something and thus steal CPU cycles, which are fairly easy to detect if you know how long things take to start up and how long typical operations take. Anything out of the ordinary raises my 'investigate' radar (and it usually turns out to be short-lived - something stupid like Chrome updating in the "background" every week or so).

I have tools on hand to periodically sweep for rootkits or what have you (e.g. malwarebytes) and to deal with cleanup if anything does hit, but in 20 years of windows computing, I've been infected once... and that was through my own stupidity on a Windows XP box.

Yes I've tried Mint and like it, though I tend to run Ubuntu (SSH only) on my VMs for workhorse operations like web servers, since I don't generally need the shiny desktop environment.

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verity100
Mary Poppins

My husband gave me his old bank laptop. It runs on Linux and is really quick. He did explain why it was almost impossible to get a virus but I can't remember why. I know it also runs Web browsers that let you do things windows ones won't. I can't copy my stories off Lush on windows but I can on Linux. I can save them as Word or PDF. 
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PYKW99
Active Ink Slinger

Hi everyone, I've just found this on the internet and the link is here https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/g2gi9x/can_linux_be_infected_with_virus/

Can Ubuntu get viruses?

You’ve got an Ubuntu system, and your years of working with Windows make you concerned about viruses — that’s fine. There is no virus by definition in almost any known and updated Unix-like operating system, but you can always get infected by various malware like worms, trojans, etc.

Basically, it's still possible for Linux to get infected, just a little harder and no computers are immune to it
BadBoyCool
Rookie Scribe

Quote by PYKW99

Hi everyone, I've just found this on the internet and the link is here https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxmasterrace/comments/g2gi9x/can_linux_be_infected_with_virus/

Can Ubuntu get viruses?

You’ve got an Ubuntu system, and your years of working with Windows make you concerned about viruses — that’s fine. There is no virus by definition in almost any known and updated Unix-like operating system, but you can always get infected by various malware like worms, trojans, etc.

Basically, it's still possible for Linux to get infected, just a little harder and no computers are immune to it

That pretty much sums it up. Linux isn't immune any more than Apple stuff is or Android either. There's actually some pretty nasty stuff that targets Unix like systems it's just that most malware is targeted at Windows because there are more systems running Windows and more people program for Windows based systems as well as the people that are serious about creating malware wanting to get the most return on their efforts.

It's easy to confirm Linux being vulnerable as that's the whole reasons why certain distros exist, to minimize the chances of being infected and/or to minimize the consequences of being compromised. They actually do a pretty good job of that IMO and even the distros that aren't specifically security focused benefit from the numbers.

If you like you can even run Windows inside of a virtual machine which give it protections enjoyed by Linux and if you have a commercial interest, say you;re delivering content you can run virtual servers using Docker or a couple of other similar solutions which in the event you have an intrusion, hardware failure or some other problem that might cause a long downtime to deal with if running on bare metal can be good as it was before in a very short time simply by starting another instance from your backups.

It seems to me that there's probably more and better options available with Linux to help keep your privacy and stay as anonymous as is possible.

That being said even with the powerful tools available, there is no such thing as privacy and sometimes it's ridiculously easy to get around protections, especially if you have physical access and depending on who might be targeting you such as a well-funded state actor any machine, network or OS can be penetrated. Social engineering is at least as big a threat as technical expertise and mistakes in following security procedures or becoming lax can result in an event and really it's a miracle that there aren't more breeches as it's often simply blind luck that a momentary window of vulnerability is either discovered or scoots by without being noticed.

Virus scanners only catch the easy stuff and they just use a lot of resources. They miss the worst stuff like polymorphic rootkits that can evolve, re-writing itself on the fly in a live environment.
BadBoyCool
Rookie Scribe

~~

On my 8yr old laptop linux mint screamed! It booted in 8 seconds (compared to windows 7 near 1 minute boot time). I could surf to any porn site and NOT get infected. I could open mail and not get infected. Infact I dont even have an antivirus on my system and have not for 10yrs with not a single infection or issue!

I really like the speed on linux. There are many different versions of linux like Ubuntu, Debian, etc. I chose mint because it looked like windows and made the conversion easier.

There is a site called distrowatch that you can view each version. You can also go to each linux website and view screenshots. If you want to try it just down load a iso of the version you want and use a usb boot loader to install a bootable copy to the flash drive. Then boot your computer with it plugged in. You might have to change the bios settings if it doesnt detect.
~~

If you're not worried about getting whiplash you might check out Slitaz. The core OS is something like a paltry 45MB and it boots pretty quick off a CD, and of course even faster if on a USB. If you run it live from either medium it runs completely in RAM, making it unbelievably fast, however if you install it to disk it doesn't run in RAM so it's a little slower. If you install it to a thumb drive or to an SSD it will be pretty snappy and even to an HDD it's still fast. Installing live systems to HDD, SSD, or a USB thumb drive gives the added benefit of being able to use a swap partition but you can install to a thumb drive and enable persistence too, and carry your OS with you as well as being able to back up the whole OS to another thumb drive by cloning it.

Often if you have your thumb drive formatted to FAT32 or EXFAT which is just an updated version of FAT32 that supports a much larger file system and some other improvements you can simply extract the ISO to your thumb drive and it'll boot and run.
PYKW99
Active Ink Slinger

Just wondering BadBoyCool, how do you know that your 8yr old laptop Linux mint is not infected at all as there are so many different types of viruses around? All I can say is that nothing is immune to the viruses that are out there in the digital world. So it's better to be safe than sorry😎
PYKW99
Active Ink Slinger

It may be harder but still possible😊
pincount
Rookie Scribe

Long time user of Mint myself, certainly still running AV on it but of course there is less viruses available and due to the different architecture of the operating system - linux (unix based) rather than microsoft it means that none of the virus programs complied for microsoft will work on linux. That isn't to say that linux isn't at risk, but if you keep things up to date and follow standard practices you should be okay.

Quote by PYKW99

It may be harder but still possible😊
BadBoyCool
Rookie Scribe

It's absolutely possible to compromise Linux however I don't run an AV on anything other than doing an occasional scan as someone also noted even on Windows. How many types of spoons do you need for soup? AV is imperfect and adding more isn't going to give a reasonable return past a certain point.

You have to find a point on the spectrum between "nothing" and "everything" that you can live with.

Remember also that some of the largest panics in recent years were sort of hardware bugs, or firmware bugs. With physical access it's game over if that should occur BTW.

You're all correct.