I’m in the same spot and 95% settled on moving to debian.

xubuntu has been good to me the last 10yrs. But its been about xfce, ubuntu got be part of the relationship because it was easy when i knew very little about linux. that and it can run well on a potato with a bunch of computer parts just duct taped randomly onto it. which is basically what my dumpster dived laptop was 10 yes ago.

thats just a short term fixes too though. the ads will get more intrusive and annoying. and at some point pro ads will just turning themselves back on. because this is a company and it wants to sell things.

“it’s possible i buried a self delete timebomb in one of our repos years ago. enjoy looking for it just incase assholes”

this is how i see other sysadmins when they explain their 30yr old bash script that does everything.

huh, i cant tell if that limitation is in the modern mac version either. eh, i dont recommened buying anti virus anyway. looking into a dns ad blocker like pihole is a good tactic as well. I got tired of my kid turning his windows system into threat to everything on my network. few public block lists on a pihole did more good than the windows anti virus.

Ok i’ll answer the question asked first. if i absolutely had to put a consumer endpoint protection on one of my macs. i’d probably do clamxav again. that said.

after 15 yrs in enterprise apple device management, i still reccomend a solid remote backup solution at the consumer level instead. anyone who claims macs cant get viruses is kidding themselves, but honestly we dont bother attempting to clean infected macs. wipe and restore. put your money into protecting your data and for the love of all gods install the updates.

going crazy and jumping into the jamf consumer level ecosystem is an option as well. but way over the top unless you’re really bored with money to burn.

About two years ago my set up had gotten out of control, as it will. Closet full of crap all running vms all poorly managed by chef. Different linux flavors everywhere.

Now its one big physical ubuntu box. Everything gets its own ubuntu VM. These days if I can’t do it in shell scripts and xml I’m annoyed. Anything fancier than that i’d better be getting paid. I document in markdown as i go and rsync the important stuff from each VM to an external every night. Something goes wrong i just burn the vm, copy paste it back together in a new one from the mkdocs site. Then get on with my day.