reminder: most proprietary antivirus programs targeted towards home users such as avast and AVG are essentially malware themselves. personally i consider them to be trojans, spyware, and adware. they claim to keep your system completely safe, but in reality they mostly just slow it down, download unwanted software, advertise to the user, and do basically nothing but sit around and try to detect malicious files, which often causes false flags or doesn't properly detect them.
antivirus companies profit off lying to their userbase, they have tricked most computer users into believing that their system is in danger when it really isn't, generally windows defender does more than enough to keep your system safe, and if you're not downloading any suspicious files, you're fine. even worse, they try and get access to your phones too, which absolutely are not high risk at all due to having tighter program restrictions than windows.
@mjdxp Why do I agree? Perhaps because I experienced the same. They're awful. Also, very inaccessible, and inaccessibly hard to remove as well.
@bluespacedragon they make their programs intentionally difficult to remove, they try and use scare tactics to keep the software on the user's PC, honestly it should be illegal to do that
@mjdxp Absolutely. Like a website that doesn't let you delete your data. Both those should be absolutely illegal. Also, what's wrong with standard installers? If your software worked well, you don't need fancy captchas or weird 3rd party utilities that get rid of you accessibly to get rid of you if you made the software actually do any job.
Wow. I've been on Linux long enough now that I kinda forgot those programs even exist.
"... oh yeah! Anti-virus software ... I remember that stuff ... what a racket."
@nattiegoogie @mjdxp lol me too
@mjdxp you got a point
I hope this whole industry vanishes
Of course, that's not happening anytime soon. People bully me because i dont use antivirus software... And i try to explain how useless it is
Source: turns out there are people who don’t know what an adblocker even is or that you can use plugins in your browser. 🤦🏻♀️
For example, i remember seeing in one blog post for mozilla, only 20% of their users have extensions at all
The stupid thing is, my friends know I am much more advanced than them in terms of technology, and have seen me mess around with my laptop plenty of times before, so the fact that they don't even bother to ask me why I don't have an antivirus and just complain about it is annoying and concerning.
@allinone0 @mother suffering from success lol
only 20% of their users have extensions
I bet that a small portion of them actually use an adblock. I recently saw a twitter thread recommending plugins and all of them were for proprietary services or useless for the grand majority of internet users.
Not a single one was an adblock 
I remember using a computer with Avast and it was annoying, kept saying "Avast virus database has been updated" out loud in the middle of whatever you were doing
@AlienSkyler @mother @mjdxp now that my friends is a virus
i have firsthand experience with avast, a family member uses it despite me trying to get them to uninstall it. avast installed its own shady web browser without user permission and set it as the default, it slows the system down to a crawl, it often sends notifications asking the user to pay for a premium subscription, and it hasn't detected any malware, probably because they don't really download many files at all.