You all know that I don’t like Defender. It gives many people unending grief and others a free pass. The empire as a service has been setting its sights on the Mac (and possibly other OSs). Will the pirates win? Or will the empire? May the FLOSS be with you.
I heard this on a podcast I listen to… And I was like… Who is going to pay for this?
Real LOL.
Every comparison of antivirus/firewall products for Windows that I’ve ever read has placed Defender at or near the bottom of the list in terms of the protection offered.
Maybe it’s a stealth operation to reduce the protection of Mac in order to improve Windows market share. 
Many years ago, in the time of XP, Microsoft’s antivirus was actually a real champion, lightweight, effective and unintrusive, beating competition on the tests. It didn’t come with the OS and it wasn’t advertised at all.
Now it is more resource hungry than the competition, providing the “basic protection”. This might even be on purpose (not to piss off AV companies and EU bureaucracy). And the clumsy MS code might be an improvement for Apple, who knows.
Wait until the logo becomes more menacing.
Formed following […], the organization has amassed its power in secret over three decades.
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I’m responsible for IT on a small government company (around 50 employees) and we use Defender as our anti virus / firewall for every workstation, besides running a border firewall and proxy server.
I must say that I changed my mind regarding Defender.
It definitely doesn’t hog the cpu no more as I was used back in the W7 days.
Not sure how it behaves on Windows Home editions, since we have Windows 10 Pro installed in all workstations.
As for the protection rate, late reviews say they are fair enough.
So far, so good.
(At home I’m all Linux)
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I may be throwing more flak at Defender than it deserves (because it is so fun 
).
The main thing that I am having trouble with is that it is particularly hostile to files and processes that I have started to accumulate since my deep dive into this community and installed win10. It is all this non-commercial stuff that it is paranoid about, scanning and slowing down at every data read and write and process compute.
Actually, I had the opposite experience with Defender win7 edition. It was really pleasant. Never raised any alerts though, so I don’t know how effective it was.
Strange… I don’t know what files and processes are you referring at, but I ran a couple of open source software at my workstation and never had any issues with it. Including doing a couple of edits on Darktable and Gimp at lunch time.
My mother’s laptop runs Win10 Home with Defender. I use GIMP on it every now and then and never receive an alert, or seen it slow down her computer.
It is completely OK for mothers and aunties, less intrusive than any third party AV. System slowdowns can be measured, not actually experienced, except probably on low-end machines. Should be no problem on mighty Mac computors.
Our Granny must be defended, no matter the cost!
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