Just Fired Microsoft

[TexasGuy1988]

Just wrapped up the hard installation of Kubuntu. Just spent the last few hours playing around with some things and getting everything sorted out. Downloaded and installed updates, setup my printer, migrated over all my files, etc. Then I got to thinking: "I am doing everything the same way as if I still had a windows machine...which I no longer have. I have a few questions. Please keep in mind that I am new to Linux and have never ran anything on a home computer except for windows.

1. downloaded a virus scanning software from the discover software portal. It's called ClamTK. It was suggested in a PC World article. Is it necessary to scan for virus' everyday like in windows? This software seems a little lacking. Is that by design because Linux is so much more secure?
2. Do I have to defrag the hard drive? Is that even a thing?
3. Is software from outside the discover software portal safe?
4. Will all commercially developed software for Linux work just fine, or will it be hit and miss?

I am sure I will be adding to this list, but for now this will get me started. Thanks guys.

[GreyGeek]

J..... I have a few questions. Please keep in mind that I am new to Linux and have never ran anything on a home computer except for windows.

1. downloaded a virus scanning software from the discover software portal. It's called ClamTK. It was suggested in a PC World article. Is it necessary to scan for virus' everyday like in windows? This software seems a little lacking. Is that by design because Linux is so much more secure?
2. Do I have to defrag the hard drive? Is that even a thing?
3. Is software from outside the discover software portal safe?
4. Will all commercially developed software for Linux work just fine, or will it be hit and miss?

I am sure I will be adding to this list, but for now this will get me started. Thanks guys.

Welcome to Linux and specifically to Kubuntu!

1) I only use ClamAV (ClamTK is the GUI front end to clamav) to check incoming mail. Not for me because malware usually doesn't infect Linux systems, unless you run javascript while visiting the darkweb or pron sites. Some of my friends still use Windows and I often forward email on to them. There are two other malware detection apps that folks sometimes use: Lynis (formerly root kit hunter - rkhunter) and chkrootkit. Lynis is in the repository and is more up to date. Chkrootkit has to be downloaded from a 3rd party site. I don't use either tool. IF you run a Linux webserver you might want to consider ISPProtect, but I don't do that either.

Linux does not have anything like Microsoft's ActiveX controlls. In Linux EVERYTHING is a file. Everything. Printers, drives, displays, sockets, ports, etc. They are represented by files with what are called Major and Minor magic numbers. I'm not going to explain thaose here but it is something you may want to look up if you are curious, but it isn't necessary. To get infected the first thing you have to do is download the malware and SAVE it as a file. Then, you have to add the execute permission. Then, you have to issue the command to run it. You are not going to do any of those three actions by accident. The closest thing to an automatic run without those steps occured about 5-10 years ago with the ".desktop" extension, but that hole was quickly repaired.

2) By default Linux uses the EXT4 filesystem, unless like me, you select the BTRFS during the install. Neither file system requires defragging. Sometimes, when a Linux system does not gracefully unmount its drives, i.e., hardware crash or power interruption or some other problem that prevents the user from gracefully shutting down, the file system is corrupted. During the next cold boot this is detected by the kernel and fsck is run on the drive before it is mounted. NEVER run fsck on a mounted drive. 99.99999999999% of the time that fixes the system and the user never even knows they had a disk problem. However, if what are called the "superblocks" are damaged it may require user manual intervention. This most often occurs as drives begin to fail. However, I've been running Linux since 1998 and I cannot remember the last time I had to run fsck, if ever. Many a time, while setting at my desk working on my computer, a thunderstorm announces its arrival by throwing a lightening bolt near my house. I usually don't wait for the second bolt, I reach up and immediately yank the power cord of the power strip out of the wall socket. The worst case mode is I may have to reinstall my system, but I don't have to buy a new computer or replace hardware (except on one case when the most recent strike blew out my eth0 chip, which happened a couple years ago). Like malware, I never worry about file system failure.

3 & 4) As a rookie I'd recommend that you only install applications using the repository. If Discover is too slow for you then install muon. No pretty pictures but a whole lot faster. Installing apps from softpedia, zdnet, or somemag or website is something I'd NEVER do. Perhaps from the launchpad or GitHub, IF I KNOW the developer or it is recommend to me by someone I trust. Installing commercial apps like Steam, Teamviewer, etc? Steam games are a blast. Teamviewer works great! I love Universe Sandbox^2, and several others. I installed SpaceEngine 0.98 from its website. Runs great. As a former physics and math teacher I ALWAYS install SageMath from it's website. I installed and play Minecraft, using openjdk. I have both -11 and -8 installed. I've installed Orbiter2010, the space shuttle simulator. And, I've used WINE and POL (PlayOnLinux) to installed several Windows applications that I've used, like my wife's heart monitor software, the IQUAN PCL GUI RAD tool from Parker Systems, and many others I can't recall right now. My favorite 3rd party app source is AppImage.

Some commercial Windows apps won't run on Linux, but they are becoming fewer and father between. The reason is that open source apps are often equal or better than their closed source counter parts. LibreOffice, for example, is 95% compatible with MS Office, and 95% is usually good enough. PostgreSQL is also 95%+ compatible with Oracle, and PostgreSQL is good enough. GIMP 2.10 is getting good enough to replace Photoshop for most users. OBS (Open Broadcast Software) is now the defacto standard for most desktop recordings for YouTube and Twitch, and it is free. Why pay for something that isn't as good as OBS?

Finally, Microsoft added the WSL (Windows Subsystem Linux) to Win10. Their Azure server farm is all Linux. They've joined the Linux Foundation and contribute heavily to the Linux kernel. They bought GitHub. Have they reformed? I doubt it. However, I suspect that sometime in the near future ALL their software will be released for the Ubuntu desktop, since that is the console system they've installed in Win10 WSL. And, just gazing into my cloudy crystal ball, I suspect that some future release of Windows will be based on their own Linux kernel with proprietary binary blobs connecting their version of the Linux kernel to their application GUI front ends. It's either that or continue to hemorrhage market share like they've been doing since VISTA and Win8 and WinPhone.

[TexasGuy1988]

Well you've certainly given me plenty to think about, and you've sufficiently answered most of my questions. Thank you.

[shag00]

First up, Grey Geek's answer is near impeccable for our politically correct world but if you want to do things like play AAA games or use software that is only available in for Windows that advice will, to a large extent, make that impossible. I would say it is being overly cautious. I am not anywhere near as technically knowledgable as Grey geek, in fact I am a novice compared to him but moved to Ubuntu about 4 years ago and understand what you might need, so here is my take:
1/ Forget anti virus on Ubuntu
2/ If you formatted your drives in ext 4, forget about defragmenting drives
3/ It's like anything, there are respected names which you can feel quite safe and free to use and when you read up on what software you want there are sites you will soon find that are on the up and up. omgubuntu.co.uk, ubuntuhandbook.org, itsfoss.com are good trustworthy sites to name only a few. The Discover portal, as you will soon discover, is a heap of ****, so use muon. The following PPAs I have used for years with no problems:

scott@scottubuntu:/media$ sudo apt-get update                         
[sudo] password for scott: 
Ign:1 http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb stable InRelease
Hit:2 https://download.mono-project.com/repo/ubuntu stable-bionic InRelease                                                   
Hit:3 http://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb stable Release                                                                    
Hit:5 http://ppa.launchpad.net/lutris-team/lutris/ubuntu eoan InRelease                                                       
Ign:6 https://mkvtoolnix.download/ubuntu eoan InRelease                                                                       
Hit:7 http://ppa.launchpad.net/mc3man/mpv-tests/ubuntu eoan InRelease                                                         
Hit:8 https://mkvtoolnix.download/ubuntu eoan Release                                    
Err:14 https://dl.winehq.org/wine-builds/ubuntu eoan InRelease                                                                
Err:15 https://repo.skype.com/deb stable InRelease

This is my current list of non Canonical repositories which is fairly small and does not really illustrate how many good PPAs there are out there. In fact I have never run into one. Like anything, just be smart.

4/ What little of it there is works fine, I use Google and Skype.

[jglen490]

And therein lies the crux of all of computing.

What do I, as a computer user, want my computer to do for me.

The rest is simply understanding that Linux is not Windows and Windows is not Linux.

1) Antivirus is at this moment in Linux a watse of CPU cycles.
2) ext4 - I love it, others love BTRFS. ext4 will do self checks at boot from time to time. It is the nature of hardware to fail. If your computer is all about maximum uptime, then learn about fsck.
3/4) Discover what's available in terms of the repositories, what's available from PPAs, what's available in the wild. Be skeptical about all of it, do your own research. Be exceptionally diligent about backing up your own data and files. When your computer fails because of bad software, AND when your computer fails due to hardware, be prepared to re-install. It gets easier with practice.

Last word:
"What do I, as a computer user, want my computer to do for me."

[TWPonKubuntu]

Thanks to all who are contributing to this thread. I learned a couple of things just reading it.

Let me add a personal warning to those who are still using Google and Google tools/utilities:

I strong (STRONGLY) advise that you begin to move away from Google.

Google is NOT your friend, no matter what others may tell you. Stop drinking the Google Koolaid.

If you can't make that change immediately (though I recommend you go cold turkey, bite the bullet, etc.), then start with using another search engine. I recommend Duckduckgo.com. It is my ONLY search engine, I have deleted all other search engines in my browsers. The reason is to prevent my search details and my online profile from being added to the several different databases maintained by the unsafe search engines. Don't be their product.

The next step is to dump the Chrome browser. You have several choices to replace it. I use Palemoon, which is a Firefox fork. I still have Firefox (Mozilla) from the Linux repositories, but I don't use it. Chrome may be pretty, but it is made by Google. 'nuf said.

Lastly, I recommend installing a script blocker. I use NoScript, a third party tool. There are others available. My configuration of NoScript has a hard block on all things from Google.com. I do, occasionally, relax that block if I really, really, really need to see a webpage which is using Google utilities, but that is rare, Very Rare, really. I use the 'temporary' relaxation of the block and when I'm done with the site, I restore all my blocks. I also put a hard script block on most third party scripts, particularly those which are known to be trackers. Do your own due diligence research on these.

Keep your firewalls up unless you have trust in the website you want to view. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, "Verify first, even then give only limited trust".

It is a jungle out there, be careful. Be glad you use Linux.

[GreyGeek]

Everything jglen and shag00 say is valid.

The main reason why I use BTRFS is that I can create backup snapshots of my system (@ and @home) in less than a minute. And, I can do incremental backups to an external HD in about 3 minutes. My system size is 140GB. I keep three weekly snapshot pairs on my sda and two to three times that on a larger external HD. I could, if I wanted to, do a snapshot everything evening just before I shut down. Or, I could make snapshots every hour on the hour to my active drive. IF something breaks or breaks in or fails a rollback to the most recent snapshot removes the problem. I ALWAYS create a snapshot pair just before I do an update or start a major experiment. If things work out I delete the snapshot pair. If not, I rollback to that snapshot and restore my system to what it was before the update or experiment, and rolling back takes no more than 3 minutes and a reboot. All of this is described in the BTRFS subforum.

Like jglen and shag00, I never bother with AV. I used to, but running it for years and never finding anything led me to the conclusion that the Ubuntu based environment is safe and I stopped wasting my time. (Linux is not Windows!) I keep my ufw (Ubuntu FireWall) up and use the ufwg GUI to interface with it. That keeps the bad actors knocking on my back doors from getting in. I have DD-WRT firmware on my Buffalo N600 wireless router and its firewall is also on. In 22 years of using Linux I have NEVER been infected with malware or been broken in to. But, I don't visit pron sites or play on the DarkWeb. IF you are suspicious of an app you can always run it inside a sandbox using firejail. or install VirtualBox and then install Kubuntu inside the VirtualBox as a virtual machine (VM) and then take a VB snapshot (not the same as BTRFS). Then run your suspicious app inside that VM. If it turns out to be nasty restore your VM using the VB snapshot. Quick and easy. You can also experiment with changes you want to make in your Kubuntu installation by practicing in the Kubuntu VM. When you get things worked out make the changes in your real system.

[Qqmike]

Ok, so I have a story, too, one that will beat many others. I've never needed a backup. Period. Never. Been using PCs intensely--like you guys--for years, Linux-Kubuntu since about 2006. I used to do fancy backups, using all sorts of stuff, separate HDDs, external HDDs, etc. & whatever. But for the past several years I do backups the old-fashioned way: I identify those things I want to save, then copy the sh&*t to thumb drive(s). Never really needed to access that set of backups. There are use cases where a backup should be mandatory. Like work. Like experimenters. Like serious hobbyists. On that note, and as many of you regulars know, I've experimented to beat h&ll with the boot loader, in all ways imaginable; and have had serious problems, unable to boot and the loader totaled. But even so, never had a problem needing any backups (and there is * always * a way to get booted, or, at least, to access your data). As has been said lately around here, What is your use case? What are your backup needs?

FWIW.

[TexasGuy1988]

Thanks to all who are contributing to this thread. I learned a couple of things just reading it.

Let me add a personal warning to those who are still using Google and Google tools/utilities:

I strong (STRONGLY) advise that you begin to move away from Google.

Google is NOT your friend, no matter what others may tell you. Stop drinking the Google Koolaid.

If you can't make that change immediately (though I recommend you go cold turkey, bite the bullet, etc.), then start with using another search engine. I recommend Duckduckgo.com. It is my ONLY search engine, I have deleted all other search engines in my browsers. The reason is to prevent my search details and my online profile from being added to the several different databases maintained by the unsafe search engines. Don't be their product.

The next step is to dump the Chrome browser. You have several choices to replace it. I use Palemoon, which is a Firefox fork. I still have Firefox (Mozilla) from the Linux repositories, but I don't use it. Chrome may be pretty, but it is made by Google. 'nuf said.

Lastly, I recommend installing a script blocker. I use NoScript, a third party tool. There are others available. My configuration of NoScript has a hard block on all things from Google.com. I do, occasionally, relax that block if I really, really, really need to see a webpage which is using Google utilities, but that is rare, Very Rare, really. I use the 'temporary' relaxation of the block and when I'm done with the site, I restore all my blocks. I also put a hard script block on most third party scripts, particularly those which are known to be trackers. Do your own due diligence research on these.

Keep your firewalls up unless you have trust in the website you want to view. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan, "Verify first, even then give only limited trust".

It is a jungle out there, be careful. Be glad you use Linux.

Sounds good to me. I for one hate the idea that every single keystroke is being tracked. That is one reason I have forbidden Alexa and all other smart home systems from my house. The problem with moving on from Google is more complex however. You mentioned the Chrome browser and the search engine. Those are easy enough to move away from. It is a little more difficulty to move on from the other things that I use google for. The beauty of google is that it has seamlessly integrated pretty much everything I do online with a single long in. For example when I travel, I use Google Maps even if I know where I am going. I live South of Houston and the traffic is stupid.

If something happens ahead to cause a delay, Google maps will recalculate the fastest route and automatically display the new route...all without my input. My cloud storage is also Google Drive. With a single click of a button, I can instantly upload a document to my drive. I can also post secure links to that document and share it on any medium. Also there is no viable replacement for the Play Store or for YouTube. I access all these services with a single log in on either my phone or my computer.

I said all that to say this: You are right. I began the change to a more secure and better computing environment by moving from Windows to Linux but the move is not complete. I need guidance on the following, and remember to keep it basic. I am still new to this.

1. cloud storage. I need to access it from both phone and computer with the same login. Preferably through an app on my phone, but browser only option is fine too. I need this service to allow me to post secure links to these documents and share them. I occasionally share relevant research papers I have written and in most places it is not viable or even impossible to share an actual entire document. I also need it to accept file backups from my phone.

2. mapping service. I need it to be able to route either the fastest OR the shortest route from A to B. I also need it to be able to reroute around delays and traffic. It should be updatable to show the latest construction and closures. Ideally, I would like to be able to type in a name from my address book and map a route like I can on Google Maps.

3. video calling. The Google equivalent that I use is called Google Duo. It should be able to show HD video...that it. No bells or whistles.

3. translation software. Chrome's browser integrates their translation software. I have it set to automatically translate pretty any foreign language into American English. Does Firefox have an equivalent? If so, how do I activate it?

I can do my own research and find out some options on my own of course...but there are numerous options out there and some of them are erroneous or don't work well, and obviously you already have your own substitutions that work. You brought the subject up, so I am asking you for your opinions and suggestions.

[TWPonKubuntu]

My only use of backups has been when I get a new/used computer and install a fresh version of Linux. I then use the backups (on USB drives) to restore my work documents, all in the /home directory.

[TWPonKubuntu]

TexasGuy
Of your four uses:

1. cloud storage.
2. mapping service.
3. video calling.
3. translation software.

I don't use any of these, so I cannot recommend alternatives. Perhaps others here can offer more.

[jglen490]

No cloud provider is your friend, for the very same reason as Google is not your friend. No one needs your data, they have so much metadata on you and your interests, that the actual data is just a distraction.

Should you stay away from Google? Only if you can stand the inconvenience. There are so many good browser tools to help you shield yourself.

Know where you are, know what you have in front of you, train your email service, refrain from clicking on a link before hovering and actually seeing the underlying link. Never fall for click-bait.

[shag00]

1/ Cloud storage - set up your own server and get a fibre internet connection.
2/ Maps - Google owns the market, either directly or through buy outs such as Waze. There are some available for Mac but reportedly not much chop.
3/ Video calling - There are independent apps out for now but for how much longer? Issues with the party you wish to contact, cross platform ability, their willingness.
4/ Translation - Google own the market, I think I am correct in saying there are no other free translation services that come within coo-ee of Google.

As much as I agree with jglen490, if you want the ease that today's connected world offers, free of charge, then there is no escaping Google.

[TWPonKubuntu]

I'll do without, rather than allow Google to have control.

[shag00]

You are very much in the minority, not that that is any way a bad thing, more a curiosity on how you get by more than anything. As I said in the discussion over on mobile phones, maps is a killer app for me. Anyone who travels extensively internationally just loves maps and translation.