Okay so long story short I switched from Win7 to Linux Mint because the last 3 installs of Win7 all started off good and eventually starting showing signs of infection. LM was good for a few month but now it's acting weird too. The most extreme symptom I have is that Thunderbird (email client) persistantly opens and then closes multiple instances seemingly by itself. I launch it once, it runs fine, and then hours later it's trying to close itself while sometimes 2, 3, even 4 other instances are trying to close. And when I try to use "System Monitor" to "kill" the process(s), they jump around and seemingly avoid mouse clicks. I reboot the system to clear the problem. I get the feeling that someone is launching and killing thunderbird in an effort to create some kind of fault condition to gain root access. There's a bunch of email passwords stored in thunderbird too. Standard financial data, bank, utility companies, online shopping, etc... nothing exotic like plans for a nuclear weapon or information proving that a Supreme Court Justice is a pedophile (which is why he voted the way he did on Obamacare, i.e. blackmail). Anyways, if this were a Windows machine I would hit Task Manager and look at all the processes in order to determine which ones looked unfamiliar, and then check the registry in those locaitons where things launch, etc... but I have no clue about Linux. It's ALL unfamiliar and there's a bazillion things running and they all have odd-sounding and funny names, like xterm and shaniqua and shontrell. sudo keep it in your pants and you won't have to sudo wonder who the baby daddy be. Sudo rhymes with Menudo, which is soup made from intestines. It's all part of the great cosmic whole, and for reasons we can only guess at sometimes. (All of that was aimed at one specific person, in case you are wondering WTF I'm talking about. She'll know who she is, and acknowledge it, so then you'll know too, if you want. Or not.) Anyways I don't want a look-good, feel-good BS software that scans your computer for every 1 and 0 and ends with a Happy Ending and then take-out Chinese food eaten on the balconey (post-coital routine), I'm looking for the same kind of tools like what I had for Windows after years of searching and trial and error, and I want them right off the bat with no learning curve and little to know effort on my part. I know it's there, I just got to find the right connect, yo. Oh, yeah and the malware-y, infection-y symptoms are coincident with unsolicited calls via Skype (for linux, and it's DIFFERENT) from a guy that makes his living coding Linux (he's the one that talked me into LInux in the first place). So I wonder if Linux Genius could have made custom script that uses a skype voice connection as a vector. I have a VPN, and so I assumed I was safe, but if the bad guy is your "friend" and he's connected via voice then maybe there's a vulnerability in Skype (for Linux, it's DIFFERENT) that could be exploited? Or one in Thunderbird? Or both even? Yes, I'm paranoid. So f-ing what. They're out to get me. REALLY. Most paranoids are just disturbed whack-jobs and meth addicts. I'm neither. My paranoia is JUSTIFIED. Even my invisible grey alien friend agrees with me. He speaks to me telepathically through neural transmitters in his eyes.
Reminds me of the built in assembly language in Turbo Pascal 7.0. Once upon a time I wrote a unit in assembly and offered it as shareware, got no bites though. Although he did not know it, Timo Salmi (?) was my mentor.