I’m still in the research phase of switching to Linux and don’t know if this concern is reasonable. I’m not tech savvy. I’m comfortable in the windows ecosystem and could use the dos prompt fine when they used it. I played with QBasic and C++ when I was younger and have built a few computers but that was a couple decades+ ago.
My concern is dealing with malware. I know that Linux has less issues with malware than Windows but, as I understand it, that’s primarily because it has a comparatively small market share. I feel like I’m getting into Linux just as it’s getting more popular and that it will get worse if the EU moves away from Microsoft because they will most likely adopt some form of Linux as their new standard. More less tech savvy people like me moving to Linux makes it a juicier target for people who create and use malicious software. It’s not a reason to stay with Windows but is it a reasonable concern? Are there sufficient tools for people who don’t really know what they’re doing to be reasonably secure on Linux and will they keep up if the threat profile expands as Linux picks up more users?
Your concerns are valid.
In my opinion the easiest solution, if you don’t know what youre doing (or dont wanna care) would be to use exclusively an immutable distro. That would lock you out of tweaking the system, but also heavily limit any potential malware. This should be sufficient imo:
This needs to be higher. It’s the first comment I came to that:
What distros are like that? I know nothing.
Fedora Silverblue/Kinonite and Bazzite are the common ones I have heard about most as immutable options.
I previously set up Kinonite on my wife’s laptop for her, as she doesn’t want to deal with any of the tech support stuff. By design, Kinonite is limited to installing programs as flatpaks without further tinkering/effort. It ultimately was a little too restrictive for what she wanted and had odd Bluetooth issues I was unable to sort out. I ended up putting the standard Fedora KDE spin on her laptop instead.