I know that Linux is more secure than Windows and normally doesn’t need an antivirus, but know myself I’m gonna end up downloading something at some point from somewhere on the internet, and it would be good to be prepared. So, which antivirus would you recommend for Linux (Mint specifically) just to double up on security?
Wine is not an emulator. It’s not sandboxed either. If you can do it as a user, a program running in wine can do it too.
There’s nothing stopping a piece of malware from crawling your disk for sensitive information, or encrypting your files for ransom.
If you run it through something like bottles offer a bit of protection in that respect?
I wouldn’t think so. Isn’t bottles just an easier way to manage wine prefixes? If so, it doesn’t do anything to hide your Linux system from the executable.
Wine prefixes are not sandboxes. They are a way to separate the windows-level configuration for different programs (eg env vars, or drivers, etc).
Wine is a translation layer between a compiled windows binary and your Linux syscalls/libraries/device drivers/etc, nothing more.
On the bottles website, it says that the bottles are sandboxes. It has a full subsystem container for each program that is isolated from the main system (according to them I guess).
To prove your point even more, WannaCrypt has a platinum rating on WineHQ.