McAfee is actual malware at this point anyway
Imagine needing an antivirus
This comment was made by Linux gang
Even Windows doesn’t really even need a 3rd party anti-virus anymore. The built in windows defender has gotten so good as to really be all you need for active protection unless you’re insanely stupid and keep bypassing it. Use Malwarebytes for deep file scans once in a blue moon, and you’re golden.
first party antivirus is still antivirus
Hate to tell you this, but Linux nor MacOS are safe without AV
It’s just Windows, by far, has the largest share of active systems so everyone targets it. Both MacOS and Linux have their own share of bonafide viruses though
Hate to tell you this, but nuh-uh! My Linux server is just going through a phase where it likes to collect porn ads and share credit card info with Russia!
have their own share
for Reeeeeeeeeeally small values of ‘share’.
"Wait! There was Lion! And … … … "
It’s still not actually needed for experienced users though, I haven’t had a virus in over 10 years, so it hasn’t had anything to catch.
Boy oh boy did it freak the fuck out about the exe I compiled myself from a python script I wrote myself, though. Had to specifically exclude it from defender to stop it from quarantining it every time it ran. All it does is check to see if a link on a website has been updated since last look…
This is the main takeaway that people seem to be missing: follow good computer hygiene, and you’ll be fine.
Keep your shit updated, and don’t download/run things you don’t trust. Keep an unintrusive anti-virus running in the background as a backup just in case there’s a supply chain attack, but don’t rely on it to make your decisions on whether to open a file or not.
golden rules of PC hygine:
don’t use an admin account as your main account
if you haven’t directly triggered it yourself, the answer to that pop-up is “no”
windows defender has gotten so good
It’s only good at detecting windows&office activation tools. I have never ever seen it detect anything other than those.
I don’t even use windows defender. Never had any issues. (My windows PC is primarily for gaming)
Do you have windows 8, 10 or 11?
Defender has been on in the background this entire time and you don’t even know it. It is on by default and incredibly hard to truly disable.
Windows 11. It’s not that hard to completely remove. I have also removed Bluetooth and lots of other non essential functions. There are plenty of tools on GitHub that can do it. You can also just use a custom ISO.
All of them use the wim_uninstall thing, right?
XP is best!
It’s been good since Windows 7. The reason Windows has so many updates is for security.
Imagine thinking you’re immune to malware
Nobody is immune to it, but it’s a lot less common for sketchy websites to provide malware downloads specifically targeting Linux PCs. The market share is nonexistent, the average user is more technically inclined, and the desktop environment ecosystem is full of variations that make it difficult to develop a one-size-fits-all solution.
It simply isn’t worth it for most malware creators to focus on Linux desktops. Servers are a different story, but that malware is planted by humans or automated intrustion tools.
That being said, none of this precludes stupidity. If somebody downloads
Oppenheimer-1080p.mkv.exeand opens it in WINE, you can bet your ass that the ransomware malware will do its job just fine.Don’t download shady exes, run ublock origin, force https, use a vpn, and reroute your DNS lookups. It’s super easy to not download viruses and malware.
I agreed with you up to the “use a vpn” part. That’s just wasting money and adding extra steps for the sake of paranoia.
If you’re using SSL/TLS and not blindly bypassing invalid certificate warnings, you’re not going to have your device or accounts compromised by the hacker boogeyman.
My VPN saves me 100s of dollars a year I would otherwise be spending on subscription services.
You have a good reason to use a VPN: bypassing region restrictions (or piracy). The people subscribed to a VPN service for security reasons usually don’t*.
* Excluding those living under a censorship heavy government.
Some VPNs advertise they stop malware so I get why they say that but you’re right.
They hide your browsing from your ISP (and probably your government)
They hide your origin and substitute another for web sites.
I’d say a VPN is only useful to people engaging in crime, or things that look like crime and those buying services that are priced differently around the world
That provide no protection against things you might click on
There are far more uses for a VPN. For instance if I want to access my NAS while outside my home.
Hasn’t a bunch of malware spyware and other malicious shit been found all over decades old Linux stuff the last couple months?
IIRC, that was more about auditing the “supply chain” of apps and Linux. Some college kids were purposefully trying to get malware on the mainline Linux repo and obviously got themselves banned from touching Linux.
Otherwise it’s just been normal security vulnerability type stuff? There was also a long-existing bug found in a very common library recently, but that’s very solidly in the normal flow of security research, the bug just happened to be sitting there a while.
Linux of course is a target and has malware. It’d be completely stupid of attackers to ignore Linux because the vast majority of servers run it. It’s a readily available target with lots of goodies on those servers.
I don’t think it was just some college kids, I could have sworn their professor was specifically getting his students to perform as bad actors to support some super-biased research papers he was trying to publish.
Yeah but this wasn’t recent, this one was like 4 or 5 years ago unless it happened again. If I remember correctly it got the entire University’s email address banned from contributing to the kernel
Oh yeah, I get what you’re saying. Yeah, two completely separate instances. Although, from the sound of it, there are a surprising number of people who seem to think that sabotaging Linux and hacking Linux are the same thing. I mean, I guess a pirate can sail on any ship, right?
Yeah but antivirus software doesn’t pick up zero days, which is what you should really be concerned about.
I had some Chinese radios a few years ago, they were proper radios that you could program for all sorts of stuff. I had the software on a USB stick, then plugged it in about 5 years later - pinged up with all sorts of viruses that weren’t detected previously.
They don’t pick up anything that they don’t know about, so once the zero day is known the antivirus/malware can find and remove it I thought.
They don’t catch zero-day exploits, as those are vulnerabilities in programs that were discovered to be used in the wild. They will eventually catch the malware dropped through those exploits, though.
CCleaner is too nowadays. How far it it has fallen…
CCleaner also hasn’t been necessary since at least Windows 7. I remember working in a PC repair shop when people would just arbitrarily run CCleaner on its most aggressive settings whether it was needed or not and it would always break more things than it fixed.
And even if it was, why tf have it open on startup? It should be run like, manually once a month at most.
I mostly used it to clear out various caches and cookies, and invalid or no longer necessary file type extensions, folders and so on.
Was very handy for that, and usually freed up a surprising amount of disk space (back when a few gigs more or less made a huge difference)
And almost Every. Fucking. Manufacturer. Installs it as bloatware :/
They get paid to do so. It’s not like they just install McAfee at random.
Oh I know, but still they couldn’t find some other software to get paid by? Like damn diversify already, find something fresh and interesting you can get paid to install lol
Like WebTangent or whatever it was called, it was bloatware, but it was bloatware games that were kinda fun. I would always play a few games before I purged that one, but I haven’t seen it in years now
I almost felt the same way about MalwareBytes. I know it’s actually useful but it hassled me so much about upgrading to premium that it was more annoying than having actual malware.
What do you mean at this point?! It’s been malware for almost two decades!
CCleaner? Adobe? Origin? McAfee? What is this, some kind of child’s computer?
Someone who doesn’t understand you can disable all those from starting with your pc
Someone who doesn’t understand that pirating EA products is always morally correct
But muh billion dollar company might lose $20?
I think you missed the reference. They weren’t referring to children as a lack of familiarity with OS functions, they were referring to children as an ignorance of programs you should ever or never install. If you have mcfee on your computer, TODAY, you should just set your computer out on the curb and never touch an electronic device again.
Until I read the original comment, I didn’t know that was the symbol for McAfee.
Since windows 7, with defender, there’s not even a use for a third party anti virus for the majority of users.
This must have come pre installed with the system. Nobody installs McAfee of their own volition, right?
A lot of systems come with McAfee on them. Especially all the shit you can buy on Amazon from the “vendor stores”.
Implies that removing them is difficult
You don’t want to remove GoG completely, but I’ll be damned if I let it just start on every reboot.
And then, when the program next updates, it silently re-enables its “startup with the computer” option, because fuck you. Of course, it updates every day, just to ensure you never “accidentally” disable it’s automatic startup!
what child could afford an adobe subscription?
Acrobat reader is free and does this.
Also, when I was a kid I sure as hell was running some pirated Photoshop and other stuff.
One that pays in TRY or ARS (1.64 and 1.40 USD respectively) ¬‿¬
Same kids who max out their parents credit cards on FIFA lol
“If this was a human being, I’d shoot it in the face”
Or grandma.
Delete mcafee and ccleaner pls
Ccleaner slaps if you have to use a spyware OS
The developers of CCleaner got acquired by Avast in 2017. I haven’t kept up with what they did with it, but Wikipedia tells me that they had a malware breach and later also intentionally installed Avast Antivirus on user PCs.
So, if you’re looking for an application to keep your PC free of crap, this ain’t it.
Avast in general is an extremely dodgy company and I would not want any of their software on my PCs.The best Avast product
Other thsn the blatant lies written on it, I agree!
They just typoed “from”
deleted by creator
The US FTC just posted a big article about their recent unscrupulous activity, actually!
After avast broke my windows installation TWICE I’m staying FAR away from anything they make. I wasn’t the only one affected, it was a widespread issue at the time. Don’t trust them with your stuff.
Instead of CCleaner, just use BleachBit. It’s free and open source and definitely not shady.
Or BCuninstaller if you’re a bit more tech savy.
Yeah, two pieces of spyware!
Exactly.
For those that don’t know, theres a tab in Windows task manager called Startup that let’s you modify what apps get started when you log in.
You can also look at the services.msc tool and check all your startup services.
Sysinternals Autoruns is like the task manager “start up” super charged.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/autoruns
Disclainer, misuse can seriously fuck windows. Use with caution. Do not uncheck microsoft crap, no matter how tempting, or anything you’re unsure about.
+1 for autoruns
Do not uncheck microsoft crap, no matter how tempting
The temptation is real though
Most raid drivers are fine to uncheck, if you have no raid. There’s one that isn’t really a raid driver and causes a bluescreen if unchecked but i’ve forgotten which.
That’s what I like the most about some software companies, the names are either cryptic, or conflicting, and nobody seems to know what is what 😅
Thanks(!!!) for the reminder. I knew about it but just never think to go in there. I just now disabled a ton of things I don’t need running.
Msconfig is also handy for disabling services as you can hide default MS services
is this a windows thing that im too linux to understand
When your Linux machine is so efficient on resources that it doesn’t even try to run your video card or wifi dongle…
My linux desktop: “Nvidia? Hmm. Yuck, no thank you.”
Linux was right on that one. Yuck nvidia.
… not necessarily their hardware, but business practices.
(For those who don’t know, that’s Linus Torvalds, the guy who made Linux, and the quote is real.)
Thats actually the guy who made git
I got some good drivers with flatpak (I think) but I dare not update my Nvidia drivers or lightdm will complain. Next PC will be an AMD card thank you. (probably going to be a few years though)
yes
People install McAfee, Epic and CCleaner?
Epic is nice for free shit and drm free games.
Still not an enough reason to install that Tencent spyware imo.
When I was on Windows that shit failed to connect to the Internet half of the time anyway. Biggest reason I preferred steam out of the two.
Until the launcher wanted to add kernel level “anti cheat”. Then Lemmy told me about Heroic… :-D
Yeah, I use Heroic Launcher just because I’m a Linux user. Anything native is always better than running it in wine, nothing against wine.
Is Heroic not using wine? I thought it’s similar to lutris.
It is but only for the games. If you ran epic games launcher on Linux it would have to be on wine because there’s no native app from epic.
And fortnite which despite all the memes is a fun game.
Hay, no judgement here.😁
Epic
You meant EA Origin?
Epic is used by devs
People playing use Heroic
Each one bringing it’s own little version of Chrome along for the ride.
USE LINUX
Jesus fuck…
Lol it’s everywhere here
For good reason, made the switch around the same time joining lemmy and haven’t looked back.
prep a live usb and try a few different window managers on whatever distro you align with, (hearing lime is easiest for beginners) youl know when you arrived home.
For me that was here
That was not even the longest winded “I use Arch btw.”
If you hate learning useful life skills, don’t use Linux! I use Arch BTW. 😉
Yeah I also switched because of here and longtime frustration with windows.
Nice dots!
News just in, Jesus Christ fucks for Linux. News at 5
I’ll buy that for a dollar
That’s a spicy meat-a-ball!
Normally I’m cool with all the suggestions to use Linux when Windows is making itself worse. It provides a FOSS alternative that avoids the new anti-feature.
But this is not an attack on Windows. Linux has startup apps as well.
Linux apps generally don’t ask for this permission unnecessarily though. I remember back when I used windows everything I installed was bundling its own update manager that runs at startup etc.
Laughs in portage/zypper/apt/pacman
I wonder if you could integrate pacman into Gentoo. What a beautiful monstrosity it would be!
Or paludis
I’ve never had any startup apps (Linux mint)
It’s okay if you want to click things all the time
KDE starts whatever was left open on my distro, and that did cause issues with apps that minimize on close, but I learned to close from taskbar and I understand why those apps do that. I actually had a harder time getting my vpn to start on startup
So what, when you turn on your computer it goes straight to the BIOS menu?
Nope you need systemd or something else to start them as far as I know.
c’mon man knock it off
signed, a fellow linux user
You’ve gotta let FrankTheHealer shout from the rooftops. He has windows to heal
How about no
WE HEARD YOU.
Ow, would you all stop screaming already? It is hurting my ears. 🙁
This is such an own goal it’s almost a meme at this point.
You know why Linux doesn’t have this shit? Because it hasn’t attracted the ire of the marketing team. Do you know why that is? Because the fraction of target users using Linux is TINY. It’s not worth the expensive engineering effort, especially when you consider the demographic using Linux is unlikely to fall for this shit.
The more you win the “use linux” argument, the more the argument won’t make sense. The day Linux gets enough user share to justify it, is the day all this shit starts happening on Linux.
Also it’s much easier to disable on Linux and not every distro uses the same program to start apps on boot so most annoying programmes can’t find it. Discord (which I would ideally move away from if my friends didn’t use it) certainly thinks it’s enabled on startup somehow.
Windows seems to start some startup apps before you log in also worries me as that means malware could start before you are able to remove it and I don’t know how to reach tty mode before reaching a gui so yeah…
They hated him because he spoke the truth
Nope
Gnutard
He didn’t even /anything with his Linux. I think that charge is incorrect
Laughs in KDE
Laughs in tty
Laughs in windows.
Unironically you’re missing the point. The point being, it’s not a problem for many apps to start because oh how powerful PCs got. The problem is when some apps use so much resources that regardless of how powerful your PC gets, it’s wasteful to have them opened all the time.
Reason for that problem is them using unoptimized frameworks such as Electron and CEF (seriously, check each app on the image).
And main reasons for that are:
-
Google posing browser component as a GUI framework.
-
Devs not caring (or being lazy) enough to do native coding.
I wish every person would realize the above so we could force developers do their job better.
Ironically, even if OP missed the point, the apps pictured are resource hogs and all of them don’t need to run on starup other than Defender.
Sure, leave OneDrive/Dropbox on if you use it. Leave Spotify if you just need your music to start blasting the second you reach the desktop. If opening Steam and waiting ~30 seconds for the lord Gaben-given daily update is too much of a problem let it do its thing on startup, but who in their right mind needs Soptify, OneNote and all the gaming clients slowing down startup of literally everything?
And CCleaner, McAffee and Adobe can go fuck themselves along wirh Nestle.
the apps pictured are resource hogs
I mean I didn’t disagree with that.
who in their right mind needs Soptify, OneNote and all the gaming clients slowing down startup of literally everything?
I guess every user who doesn’t care enough to check the autorun settings as long as it works. Probably most non-IT specialists.
Devs not caring (or being lazy) enough to do native coding.
“Waaaah waaaah, how else am I supposed to make crossplat code?” - Whines the coder whose product is only available for Android, as an electron app no less, for that one never heard of Dart+Flutter (if i’m not mistaken, the most recent Ubuntu installers interface were made with it), or Delphi/Lazarus (yes, those two use Pascal language), or even Tauri or Neutralino if they code in Javascript.
Tried some nice tool (tabame) that uses Dart/Flutter and it immediately uses 250 mb of RAM. No graphical content except some icons in the GUI. As I was going to replace task manager which uses 60 mb, I was not happy.
Wish sciter would be more popular.
That’s a lot of ram usage. Decided to try myself and on the first startup, 118mb ram. Ouch. It did fall to ~50mb after some setup, but that’s still quite high, especially compared to my task manager eating around 25mb while open. I somehow also managed to spawn 2 tabame processes, so I guess the program still needs to iron some kinks, to say the least.
-
Ew, uninstall most of that
right, a lot of it is malware
Everyone is making fun of the apps included in OP, but it’s besides the point—apps that demand resources at startup are the worst if you don’t need them. I ruthlessly deny permissions for anything installed, it’s like Gandalf in there holding the bridge and pushing presumptuous asshole apps over the bridge.
Wow… It’s such an awesome feeling that I can’t relate to this meme 🥰
