Do you still use Antivirus in 2022?

I primarily use Windows 7 as my OS with Firefox as a browser, I do use Avast free version and have been using it for last 10 years.

In last few years, virus and malware have been rare for me. Firefox blocks most of the tracking scripts and avast do stop any phishing or malware javascripts.

I personally prefer to not upgrade to windows 10/11 and Windows 7 is serving my purpose well, all the software I use/download are either from official website or from github release archives. My documents have scripts and macros disabled by default. I keep eye on every startup items, background processes and any unwanted resource hogging processes.

I tried to switch to linux for this purpose, but I needed to hack many configs and find drivers with updates. So, I went back with windows 7.

My antivirus is my brain. I use disposable VMs in QubesOS (not connected to the Internet) when opening sketchy PDFs and other documents. I rarely open attachments from email these days, but when I have to, I do it with extreme caution.

Antivirus products these days are not very privacy-aware and most of them upload personal documents to the cloud for 'analysis'. Now and then I run ClamAV on my friend's computers to clean up spyware & trojans, but that's it. Rootkits are a bigger problem though and not so easily removed because of persistence, but they can be removed by doing a clean install or just using a brand new (known clean) VM disk image.

I submit files to VirusTotal [1] all the time. The files are tested against roughly 60 AV tools and through sandboxed analyzers that explain some characteristics and behavior of the files.

[1] - https://www.virustotal.com/gui/home/upload

I have used Avira in the past, and Bitdefender up to two or three years ago. But I've stopped using antivirus software. Windows Defender is good enough for my purposes.

Putting a black box in your system to make it more secure ? Yeah, passing on that one.

No.

When I was using windows for gaming my mindset was basically to act like my computer was compromised from day 1 and everything I was typing could be read by someone else. Using an antivirus monitoring everything I do or mining behind my back would be like actually making sure I was compromised from day one....

Anything that needs to be a bit secure goes on linux, and I don't use antivirus on linux either. If you don't download garbage and aren't directly targeted by a state actor or world-class hackers you should be fine in most situations on linux, so I don't see the point. And if you are actually targeted by this kind of people an antivirus won't save you. A sandbox and acting smart might.