This is exactly the post I was trying to find today as I wondered the same thing about Red Hat and IBM having leverage over these projects.

I don’t know to what extent that happens, but any FOSS project being used to benefit a profit driven company (the software engineering giant IBM in this case) is a big red flag for me.

Quoted from the Arch wiki:

The current situation of anti-malware products on Linux is inadequate due to several factors:

    - Limited Variety: Compared to Windows, there are fewer users/clients resulting in limited interest for companies to develop products for Linux.

    - Complacency: Many believe Linux is inherently secure, leading to a lack of awareness and focus on malware protection. This creates a gap in proactive defense mechanisms.

    - Lack of Features: Existing tools often lack advanced features which are common in Windows anti-malware products, making them less effective on Linux.

This is especially bad because the amount of malware on Linux is increasing just as the possible attack surface due to the increasing number of Linux-based servers and IoT devices.
Currently on Linux one of the few existing and actively developed anti-malware solutions is ClamAV.

There is no inherent mechanism that makes your system secure to viruses just because it’s Linux. This is mostly said because, Linux being a small percentage of desktop users, it’s not yet common for hackers to target Linux systems because it’s not worth the hassle when you can just target a much larger audience on Windows that is on average much less tech literate too.

But as Linux popularity grows, viruses will start popping up on Linux as well, so it’s never a bad idea to use ClamAV. You are already more protected when you use package repositories instead of downloading executables from websites like you do on Windows, and Linux has better file system permissions, but you still need to be careful what you’re downloading and running.

Pretty unhelpful to the discussion, OP is looking for a fix, not distro suggestions

Hating on the humanities has been a talking point of the right wing for a long time, specifically because the empathy it nurtures leads to solidarity instead of survival of the fittest mentality. They say that these studies are useless to society, while capitalists are the only class that truly sits on top of society and leeches off of it

Nobara does seem pretty cool

I’d say Bazzite but I would warn him (and since he’s a developer already it might not be a big deal) if he’s looking to do any sort of dev work or whatever with Bazzite then prepare to utilize stuff like distrobox, flatpaks, etc to accomplish stuff like that

That’s what I figured, I would be very annoyed to have to use images for software I would simply do an apt install for in other distros, so I’ll leave out Bazzite from my options definitely

This is usually a good idea, but I think Arch would be a bit too much for him

Still, any Debian derivative would be just as easy for me to help and also for him to find help online, so that’s the main reason I’d choose Mint over Bazzite

ujust is not a package manager, the way I understand it from this thread is that it’s just a convenience script that internally will use one of the other methods shown in the doc you mentioned (brew or flatpak for example). So it still seems risky to me not to have access to common linux package managers besides brew

Rawtherapee is really fucking good, I used it on Windows before discovering Linux

I don’t think anyone is gonna hack you because of bash being a larger codebase

If I absolutely had to pick one as insecure, it would be anything other than bash since it has been around for so long, has its code read by so many people, that there’s no way that a major hole exists in it

Overall though I don’t think security or performance is a good metric for you to pick something as simple as a shell, just pick the one that gives you the best experience and features. Being compatible with bash is a big plus because it’s the industry standard, like zsh for example

I used to experiment around with various distros some years past until I got into Arch. Haven’t distro hopped once since, I’ve completely erased Windows from my life and I’m gaming exactly as I would if I was on Windows. I never have trouble finding a package since almost everything exists either in the official repositories or in the AUR, and I get the latest versions with all the new features and fixes. Rarely some things do break because of the rolling releases, but it’s almost always just a matter of a single google search to fix. For me it’s worth it for having all the latest versions of everything.

My opinion would be different for a server or a work laptop where stability is much more important. For servers I would pick Debian for sure, for work laptop I’d consider Fedora probably