A cautionary note: many antivirus programs monitor, track, and/or inadvertently expose your internet activity.

Honestly I haven't used one in years now. Used to like Kaspersky as it was one of the best at the time. Now Windows Defender alone is fine, maybe with MalwareBytes also.

I use malwarebytes, Its light and very responsive to any kind of weird activity going on in background. Using it for couple of years not intrusion till now..

I've used a bunch over the years, but lately I've been using Bitdefender. It's pretty lightweight and runs on both Mac and PC.

I liked Avast a lot, but I got really sick of how it would send your EXEs to their servers for "analysis" that took like 3 hours...

If using Windows Malwarebytes + Microsoft Defender. If using Linux (what I do) Malwarebytes browser extension only. To be honest, nowadays it's really hard for any crypter to fud runtime against Microsoft Defender or Avira.

ESET is what I like.

None except the built-in Defender when I don't have it disabled. I've been doing this for over 15 years and never had an issue. Don't be going to suspicious sites, etc. I also use DNS filters along a couple of other things. Suspicious files get run in VMs or sandboxes if I absolutely need to run them.

Cybersec enthusiast here, if you are on Windows, Windows Defender is basically all you need !
However, no anti virus can provide 100% safety, having basic understanding of good practices and common attack vectors is required to avoid basic attacks

I've used Norton & McAfee in the past, and now I have COMODO Internet Security, but I have a lot of its features turned off!
Any program I use that is not mainstream, it sees it as a virus and locks it up!
That's how I lost a nice Webster's dictionary!!!

I prefer default windows defender its work fine