Hi,
A lot of malware is targeting Linux... mostly servers though.
Some of you might be interested in reading this one:
https://web-assets.esetstatic.com/wls/en/papers/white-papers/ebury-is-alive-but-unseen.pdf
Its not a bad idea to have anti-malware from trusted vendor (ESET, Sophos, Elastic ...etc) on your Linux box., nowadays its called endpoint protection software due its many layers of defense... but this scenario is mostly for enterprise environments, not for the regular Joe. For servers I would recommend trying https://sandflysecurity.com , which is not requiring much of tinkering with the protected assets.
You may consider the following to make informed decision:
evaluate your threat model, I'm saying this because many Linux savvy users are security and privacy cautious. They do not download and run random stuff from the internet, also not exposing their machines to the open world. So... if the risk is low and the attack surface is small, there is really no point of looking for endpoint protection;
if you concerned mostly about downloaded files, then upload their hashes to VirusTotal, just for piece of mind, not a real protection; (you may upload the files itself, but beware that anything uploaded to VT is in the public domain, so be careful especially with documents containing sensitive information).
if you decide to go with fully featured endpoint protection, then you have to switch your Linux distro to something mainstream like Ubuntu or OpenSuse, this is because the endpoint protection has A TON of dependencies to work properly (real-time scanner mostly). You may find some opensource projects, but as I said the REAL protection comes from the vast telemetry, threat intelligence and years and years of experience with malware, thus I would recommend spending a buck with some of the commercial options.
last but not least, Linux is mostly around open-source, which is its biggest strength and in the same time WEAKNESS. The opensource landscape has been flooded with supply-chain issues for the past couple of years ( XZ utils for an example). Nothing will protect you from upstream trusted prodcut, library or whatever being breached and served you as a "benign" update.
