I mean, is it safe to assume that the torrent from megathread > monkrus > uztracker is safe? I've read that you either go genp or monkrus for less chance of malware.

Alternatively, do you think splitting the 37.5GB file into 650MB pieces and then scanning with virustotal would do much good?

M0nkrus is probably safe, that's why people recommend them so frequently.

I lack the technical knowledge to say whether splitting the file to scan would work or not, but I suspect not.

You may have to mount the iso first before a virus scanner would scan it. Which I would advise against doing on a machine you care about. And even then, it might not scan the suspect files anyway, a lot of scanners will only check files with certain extensions.

Otherwise you could just run it in a virtual machine with no network connections and see if anything sus happens. But it might not happen right away, or it might detect the VM and not trigger any malware.

These are ways you can gather information to make an informed decision, but ultimately you may just have to decide whether you trust the source enough to roll the dice. Only you can make that decision.

Yes, it's open source antivirus software.

The entire internet practically runs on what these guys do.

clamav.net/

It has a tool that you can use to scan whatever binary you want and it'll tell you whether or not it's a virus which fits what you need to do

It's not like traditional antivirus software, it just includes a tool that you can use to manually scan files to see if it has a virus signature, which is all Eset and most virus scanners are doing on the backend. They're also doing what's called heuristics, which is where they're using predictive modeling to try and identify if a program has what they call an attack signature. This does result in false positives, just so you're aware.

All virus total is doing is running a bunch of virus engines like eset and clamav on the back end to see if it triggers anything.

If both your virus software and clamav comes back clean, then I'd trust it.

A lot of the time these apps will have heuristics that will reach back out and so you will see network connections occasionally.

Without knowing more about this application, I don't have the right context to evaluate whether or not I would trust something like that, so it's gonna be up to your comfort level. But, if clamav came back clean and so did your other virus software, I would assume it's not malicious traffic.

I use Hyper-V because I run server 2022 and it's free. Hyper-V allows you to disable any host resource sharing in the VM settings.

On my sandbox VM I'll scan the files then install and scan, then run the software and scan. I use both defender and I think malwarebytes. It's a lot of extra work for no gain, but I'd rather be too careful than risk installing malware.

Average Linux command naming: yoink

Average Windows PowerShell command naming: Do-QuickPleaseRunProgramDeleteCache -Now -Force -NoFail

Note: Gaming performance is purely based on money spent. There's no fundamental reason windows would have better gaming performance, it's just that there is more money being paid to engineers and vendors to support DirectX and related tooling.

Then there's the self-fulfilling aspect that, windows has the largest marketshare, so devs are going to spend the most money targeting it, so that they can get the most money in return, which means more people will use it, which leads to the high marketshare.

The ONLY reason Linux use is seeing the few percent blip in gaming is because Valve has dumped truckloads of cash into making it viable.

This got me thinking, are there any other non-Unix-based OS's left? Really, for any hardware more sophisticated than say, an ESP? At all?

I honestly can't think of one.

You’re right in some ways; Windows is closer to a microkernel than Linux, though it doesn’t perfectly adhere to the philosophy of - there’s supposedly weird things like drawing calls in the Windows kernel that should be in microservice, I’ve heard

However, I wouldn’t necessarily call microkernels a detriment; in fact, Linux is a bit of an odd duck for going monolithic - modern Apple operating systems also run on a microkernel. Monolithic is an older architecture, and there are worries about the separation between components and system resilience e.g the webcam driver can’t crash the whole kernel.

In practice, it’s less of an issue, and there really aren’t any open source microkernel operating systems that are practical for production desktop and server use, which has a microkernel though there are certainly solutions for embedded systems.

QubesOS is built on Xen hypervisor, which uses a microkernel design, but Linux is then run in multiple VMs on top of it, which makes it more of a technicality in my eyes. RedoxOS also runs on a microkernel and is certainly intended as a desktop operating system, but its hardware support is limited; GNU Hurd is even more limited in that respect and not really usable.

Or it might not. It would be a huge short term risk to do so.

As FaceDeer said, that we truly don't know.