

Well, not really po-tay-toh/po-tah-toh. They’re 2 different utilities that do 2 different things. If you ask the wrong question, you’re not going to get the answer you’re looking for.
What you’re asking about is an antivirus. It’s been awhile since I messed with this on my Linux systems, but last I looked, ClamAV was most commonly recommended. You can probably search for “Linux antivirus” and find some recommendations.
Generally speaking, the earlier recommendations to stick with official repos is excellent. When you venture outside of that, you increase your administrative overhead because those manually installed apps won’t stay patched with a simple “apt upgrade.” That said, a well written cron job could keep them up to date for you.
As for where to install things, it’s personal preference. I prefer using my home directory. If that doesn’t work, my fallback in /usr/local, which is either its own partition or symlinked to the /home partition). I mention the partitions because having separate /home and possibly /usr/local makes it easy for these customizations you install to survive a reinstall. Backups will also help with this.
You have to ask yourself what this system will be used for. If it’s a daily driver that you want to “just work” I would stick to official repos, and minimize customizations. Windows makes a lot of choices for you. Linux expects you to know what you want to do.




Careful, I had a post like this locked almost a month ago.
FWIW, I went with purelymail, and it’s been pretty good. Basic, but solid.