Thanks for this writeup. CAD is one of the several professional workflows that I really wish could work better on Linux, but it is hard to compete against software that costs thousands per year per license.

Although, is antivirus a thing on Linux?

So generally Linux has relied on having open and auditable code to avoid exploitation of bugs and ones found can be easily discovered, reported and mitigated. The variety of configurations makes it much less appealing for hackers as an attack surface. So for the average user the biggest danger to breaking your device is yourself (but very occasionally the package manager messes something up too). ClamAV is one antivirus application Linux has…

But depending on what threats you want to mitigate here is what else you can look into:

• Protection against random unwanted internet connections to your computer: UFW (firewall)
• Protection against anyone besides you remotely SSH-ing to your machine (SSH is often disabled by default): fail2ban, strongly encrypted keys
• Protection against physical access of your disk, and data and OS: LUKS (disk encryption)
• Protection against other computer users (or yourself by accident) messing with important parts of the system: SELinux (trusted environment). Most users don’t need this for their personal PC.
• Protection against code you got off github from nuking your computer: flatpak (containerized app), docker (containerized environment), firejail (sandbox environment).