An antivirus is mostly just a blacklist of known malware. Sometimes heuristics are used such as ‘this piece of software isn’t installed on many PCs, and it appears to be doing shady stuff like, monitoring keystrokes or listening to your microphone’. But unless your antivirus is actually sentient there’s no way for it to really distinguish between a chat application that listens to your microphone so you can talk to your friends / monitor your keystrokes to know when you’ve hit the push-to-talk key, and a piece of actual malware that intends to spy on you and blackmail you.
What you have with a package manager is a whitelist of programs that have been selected by your distro maintainers. Is it completely impossible for someone to sneak malware into a distro’s repository? No, but its a lot easier to maintain a list of known good software than it is to maintain a list of known bad software. And in that situation your antivirus isn’t going to help you anyway, since the people maintaining its malware list aren’t going to magically know that something is malware before the distro maintainers do.
So, generally, just using your package manager instead of running random shit you find online is going to be a lot better than any antivirus. With things like Wayland and Flatseal becoming more common we’re heading towards a situation where fine-grained per-package permissions will become the standard way distros do things, making antivirus even more unnecessary.
In addition to what groet said, I’ll add that this is a little bit like asking “what’s the difference between a public library and Amazon?”.
Yes, there are other public libraries you could go to if the one you subscribe to didn’t have something you wanted or ‘went bad’ somehow, but the most important difference is you don’t have an antagonistic relationship with your public library. Your public library doesn’t have a financial incentive to try to trap you or screw you over.
You can install packages from other places and create your own (and then install them). The distro maintainers have one (or multiple) list of “approved” software but you can add as many lists as you want to your package manager. Often software developers will have their own package list that contains only their own software and if you install it you have to add that list to your package managers trusted software locations.
In that sense it isn’t really better than going to the developers website and downloading an installer on windows but it is quite rare you have to do that
An antivirus is mostly just a blacklist of known malware. Sometimes heuristics are used such as ‘this piece of software isn’t installed on many PCs, and it appears to be doing shady stuff like, monitoring keystrokes or listening to your microphone’. But unless your antivirus is actually sentient there’s no way for it to really distinguish between a chat application that listens to your microphone so you can talk to your friends / monitor your keystrokes to know when you’ve hit the push-to-talk key, and a piece of actual malware that intends to spy on you and blackmail you.
What you have with a package manager is a whitelist of programs that have been selected by your distro maintainers. Is it completely impossible for someone to sneak malware into a distro’s repository? No, but its a lot easier to maintain a list of known good software than it is to maintain a list of known bad software. And in that situation your antivirus isn’t going to help you anyway, since the people maintaining its malware list aren’t going to magically know that something is malware before the distro maintainers do.
So, generally, just using your package manager instead of running random shit you find online is going to be a lot better than any antivirus. With things like Wayland and Flatseal becoming more common we’re heading towards a situation where fine-grained per-package permissions will become the standard way distros do things, making antivirus even more unnecessary.
We should have done that a long time ago, as the security model of ‘any program you run can do anything you can by default’, then blacklist the ones that inevitability abuse that privilege, is completely backwards.
What’s the difference between that and a walled garden like apple?
In addition to what groet said, I’ll add that this is a little bit like asking “what’s the difference between a public library and Amazon?”.
Yes, there are other public libraries you could go to if the one you subscribe to didn’t have something you wanted or ‘went bad’ somehow, but the most important difference is you don’t have an antagonistic relationship with your public library. Your public library doesn’t have a financial incentive to try to trap you or screw you over.
You can install packages from other places and create your own (and then install them). The distro maintainers have one (or multiple) list of “approved” software but you can add as many lists as you want to your package manager. Often software developers will have their own package list that contains only their own software and if you install it you have to add that list to your package managers trusted software locations. In that sense it isn’t really better than going to the developers website and downloading an installer on windows but it is quite rare you have to do that