I'm new to mining. I'm searching for a safe way to mine Etherium on my personal PC (Windows 10).
I think the criteria are:
Also, it's very desirable to be easy for a novice.
I did little research and as far as I know, ethminer is good according to these criteria. Am I right? What do you recommend?
Let's dig into this a bit.
Ethminer is indeed open source. It is also not officially maintained as of this writing (Mar 2021) - if you look at the releases, you'll see that the last one was about two years ago! (There are some more recent commits, so it does look like there is some level of maintenance still happening, though.)
Is Ethminer easy for a novice? That might depend on what you mean by "novice". It's a command line tool, and is designed to be very, very optimized for mining, without much else. Here's a sample usage page: https://smurfy.github.io/ethminer/, it might give you an idea of what you're in for.
Before all that, though, let's have a discussion about running a miner on your computer. Remember that miners are highly-optimized pieces of software designed to get as much as they can out of hardware and direct all of it to mining. So first, it will more or less take all of your computer's resources, not leaving you with anything worth mentioning for doing anything else.
More than that, the phrasing of the question leads me to believe that you might not have a farm of GPUs attached to your personal machine. You might not even have a Nvidia or AMD card, and might be using an onboard integrated graphics. If that's the case, you'd be CPU mining, and it has been a long time since CPU mining could accomplish anything on Ethereum. If you connect to a mining pool, earning per year would be under a dollar, and if solo mining perhaps a block would be mined before the sun goes Red Giant and everything gets torched. Even if you do have a farm of GPUs, as was already pointed out in the comments, check if you'll turn any profit when faced with the electric bill.
tl;dr there isn't any meaningful mining to be done on Ethereum without GPUs geared for the task, even then it might not be profitable, and even if it is, you won't be able to use your computer while mining. Apologies if this is a letdown of an answer! On the bright side, there's still a lot that can be done without mining - maybe look into running a non-mining node.
