It's a really sad truth that to this date the only effective way to almost fully stop malware is to take away the ability from people to do what they want with their computers.
All operating systems that have some way to allow people to run malware, will get malware. Windows, OSX, GNU, Android all can get infected quite easily. Then there's iOS where you cannot, and instead Apple decides which software you can or cannot run.
The downside is of course that you cannot run any software going against the corporate values of Apple.
If you want the right to shoot yourself in the foot, AV is the necessary evil you must have, unless of course you're sure you'll never visit a website that contains an exploit, old or zeroday, against you browser or its components, and you will never open a office document, PDF or executable that has malware in it. And even then you can get owned.
All operating systems that have some way to allow people to run malware, will get malware. Windows, OSX, GNU, Android all can get infected quite easily. Then there's iOS where you cannot, and instead Apple decides which software you can or cannot run.
The downside is of course that you cannot run any software going against the corporate values of Apple.
If you want the right to shoot yourself in the foot, AV is the necessary evil you must have, unless of course you're sure you'll never visit a website that contains an exploit, old or zeroday, against you browser or its components, and you will never open a office document, PDF or executable that has malware in it. And even then you can get owned.