Quote Originally Posted by noone
With some of the buffer overflow and privledge escalation vulnerabilities lately, yes, even in a desktop setting there is some use of an antivirus. Do you need it running as a daemon constantly, no. Do you need some form of protection, yes. ... because almost none of this is installed by default, you don't have this situation on every computer out there.

You make good points here - and in a desktop setting one is more likely to have many more apps installed.


Quote Originally Posted by noone
... I don't know if you would want the daemon in the background. But why not add it to the down time cron jobs?
Good point - running a full scan when the computer isn't being used wouldn't hurt performance.


Quote Originally Posted by noone
Sure, you may trust the sources of the programs, but trusted sources don't protect you from some 0-day vulnerability that may affect your system. It comes down to a layered defence, and linuxs tendancy to have programs that do only one thing, instead of suites that do everything. You don't have Norton suite offering a firewall, IDS, virus detection, and such.

Good point - I will say personally I enjoy the work needed harden a linux box. and a layered defense is IMO better than an all-in-one solution.

Quote Originally Posted by noone
You mean like QT based systems were vulnerable to buffer overruns in BMP and other graphics files? Okay, so I cheated and went through http://www.gentoo.org/security/en/glsa/ looking for vulns, but these could affect either a stand alone system or a server being used to surf the web by an underworked and easily borred admin. And I think this is one of the things keeping linux from being "point-and-drool" because who wants to worry about all these little backgroun things, other then geeks? Not saying it's a good or bad thing, but I'm happy that I compiled my system from source.

OK, in 50 words or less - yes, AV for linux makes sense as part of your overall security strategy and I will definitely check out the program you mentioned. Personally I do see a future for desktop linux - especially in those business settings where most work is done on big iron anyway.