AV software is effectively a really complicated blacklist-based form of access control, which is a terrible way to do security in the first place.

There's no reason for antivirus software of this kind of exist on desktop Linux, because the whole operating system is free software, so if we want to fix some vulnerability that malware exploits, we can just do it (for example, by sandboxing applications), rather than implementing kludgy workarounds that turn users' machines into battlegrounds.

From what I hear, Wayland should help a lot with this, since it's much simpler and provides better isolation than X11.