this post was submitted on 21 May 2026
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laughs in proton
Proton does not protect you from harm. It’s not a sandbox.
what about bazzite set to immutable?
That does not stop things from stealing your data.
No but it also doesn't have windows on the other side, someone would have to target a proton setup to get much of anything.
Ye no. If i made malware for windows that goes over all reported drives wine will just happily translate that. Hell, by default wine will map root as z: so no, wine/proton will not help.
Even wannacry was able to cause some damage to linux if ran through wine
Why wouldn’t they? Linux is gaining market share.
Yeah, it's slowly gaining market share, but it's still a minuscule size of the user base
Would that even help? Windows malware can run on Linux precisely thanks to Wine and Proton.
You don't actually believe this, right?
My uneducated guess is that it would run inside the prefix but would have troubles with basic Windows dependencies not availiable/running, prefix's folder structure being cut down to the most basic components and barebones, and that nothing actually runs like in Windows but is rather translated from Linux commands to Windows one and back? Meaning there's no processes or services like in a VM, no way to run cmd or powershell scripts, nothing to steal without leaving containment? Am I wrong somewhere?
I recall there was a wave of dread about Proton leaving host system easily accessible and not implementing any security measures as they are out of scope, but if we assume it's a virus targeting Windows, I'm half sure it would have troubles doing anything the usual way.
The malware won't be able to do as much as it could on windows, but it can still access all of the files your user account has access to. It can steal, encrypt or delete all of your files. It can also access your microphone if you have one connected.
You can run Wine as a different user or run it with firejail to limit what it has access to.
Is it applicable to Proton in some way? I'm guilty of using less popular and thus less veried cracked software with it so I'd like some level of protection. Can I separately write it in some config file?
Proton is just Wine with some modifications. You can use the same sandboxing methods you would use with Wine.
Firejail runs apps in a sandbox.
And you can make a separate non-root desktop profile to run it in so even if it somehow escapes containment it can't run sudo commands or steal your main login's data.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d3fSnHTJdR0
Hey PieFed user, posting a 5-minute meme video where the guy struggles to make a custom virus do something through Proton isn't the own you think it is. It literally corroborates my point. Windows viruses and malware will not work through Proton.