Avira says farewell to Linux

Android? I'll bet there's more to this story than their official statement.

Possibly because Linux users are already protected by their OS and so a general rejection by those users makes the "proprietary software" unprofitable ? Clam is always out there.

I cannot think of any time where I have used antiviral software on my current installation and that has been running for 2-3 years. Android my be a different story, but from what I have seen, the main malware being loaded is coming from what I can only call "shaky and un-secure download sites".

Some folks really do want to sell fridges to eskimos.

I find it amusing that they say "Linux installations have been declining steadily for years," which is not exactly explicit. It seems that they wish to imply that 'installations of Linux have been declining steadily for years,' while the actual truth of the matter is that installations of Linux have been growing steadily for years. However, 'installations of Avira on Linux have been declining steadily for years,' and that's their real problem.

Actually the quality of the Avira product has been declining over the years, I haven't used it since 2009 so they may have improved it but judging by some recent user reviews parroting my experience i somehow doubt it.

I used to use the free version on Windows for over 4 years and it was good, extremely lightweight in cpu usage compared to other anti-virus products. Then they seriously started pushing their commercial product and the free one took a severe nosedive.

First they limited the bandwidth on their update servers, meaning just getting an update became incredibly painful for free users then they increased the amount of popup advertising and made disabling the advertising very difficult, in the past it could be easily disabled by turning off a specific service at this point I dropped the whole thing. Luckily other av products had improved over time and now I use AVG on my sole Win7 machine.

> Luckily other av products had improved over time and now I use AVG on my sole Win7 machine.

AVG is also deprecating their free version in many of the same ways. :( Our last experience with Avast also had problems, though not of that type.

In fact, at this point the only free solution I can really recommend to people is, believe it or not, Microsoft Security Essentials. That's a sorry state of affairs.