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Comment by ohashi | Hacker News Reader

Because a lot of the software that people are used to or want to run don't work on it. Gaming being a huge one.

Many games written for Windows run faster on linux now, but the biggest limitation is anti cheat for some of the larger titles. Fortnite, despite all its open platform push, probably holds linux back the most.

Apparently Fortnite has two different anti-cheats, and one of them works on Linux.

Both of them (EAC and Battleye, with EAC being Epics own product) can work on Linux if the developer integrating them chooses to allow it, but Epic has chosen not to allow it in Fortnite citing them being less secure when running on Linux. Which isn't an unfounded concern, judging by the state of cheating in Apex Legends ever since they started allowing Linux clients, nearly every cheat chooses to attack the Linux version now despite the vast majority of Apex players in general being Windows users. Most cheaters dual boot Linux for no reason other than to cheat.

> citing them being less secure when running on Linux > nearly every cheat chooses to attack the Linux version now despite the vast majority of Apex players in general being Windows users.

Did they give any more details as to why? It could come from cheaters preferring developing for one platform than the other. I would like to know which features windows has that makes cheats harder that they miss on linux.

The anti-cheats run in kernel-mode on Windows and user-mode on Linux, so it is significantly easier to hide a cheat on Linux. The Linux ACs can't see anything outside of the standard process isolation sandbox.

And to get the same for linux they would have to build a kernel module for all major distributions or open source the module and have users compile it themselves. I can see why both dont make sense for them.

Thanks for clarifying.

Sure with higher overhead of support. Running Windows on my gaming rig means all my games are capable without fail. On Linux, I have two recently played games which would require a ton of work to get them working. MSFS and WARNO.

>Many games written for Windows run faster on linux now

Is this really true? I find it _really_ hard to believe.

Steam Fossilize

As someone else reviewed the other day (in the 9590X review thread), Linux gets better worst-case performance, while Windows will likely have higher highs and lower lows

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41269996

For things like getting into the game, look at windows defender CPU usage during startup...

At least most stuff puts everything in a single .pak file and uses sqlite databases to avoid most of the windows filesystem overheads I guess.

I'm pretty sure Epic Games' "open platform" push has nothing to do with FOSS or antitrust and everything to do with money.

Tim Sweeney's tweet comparing computer users moving from Windows to Linux to "moving to Canada" comes to mind.

Also, a major way that the Epic Games store was funded was via double-digit stock investment from Tencent, one of the largest gaming monopolies and also tech monopolies. Imagine if Facebook, Paypal, Disney, and Microsoft's gaming division merged into one company, and you start to describe Tencent.

Tencent is using Epic Games to drive a wedge in the US-based tech companies and raise anti-trust concerns with them.

They are legitimate concerns. The 30% fees on the gross amount to more than half of the profits going to platform holders even after subtracting their payment processing and bandwidth expenses. And then they charge you for marketing within the store on top of those fees, driving it way above 50% of net profits on titles that want to be seen (organic visibility based is intentionally undermined by the in-store ads system).

Of course it doesn't, despite all the talk, Sweeney happily kept having his games published by Microsoft and Epic Games store released without Linux support.

Steam deck made gaming work really well, sometimes better than windows with the same hardware. It isn’t 100% compatible of course, but it does work for most things.

Not being 100% compatible makes it a non-starter. I only use Windows on my gaming machine, and until I can play all the games I play with no performance hit, I am not going to switch.

You’re confusing 100% compatible with all the games you play. All the games I play are 100% compatible, I’ve already switched. If the ones you play aren’t, of course you won’t switch. The question is whether you checked or just assumed they don’t work.

I have checked. They aren't all compatible.

Lutris. Fedora Bazzite + Flatpak = problem solved. Libreoffice? Flatpak. Updates? Seamlessly. Anything fails? Rollback.

Agreed. There are plenty of good solutions for gaming on Linux today.

But these solutions are lot more complex than the default windows experience of download steam, install game, play. Many people don’t want to tinker, they want to play their game, not the operating system.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com