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Comment by rpodraza | Hacker News Reader

I would honestly do so, but if I want to run games and music production stuff (like Cubase) I'm pretty much forced to be on Windows.

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I don’t play much AAA stuff, but Steam+Proton has gotten very good; I almost never even bother checking compatibility anymore.

I don’t know anything about music production though.

The snags arise when playing games that use specific anti-cheat measures. Which is particularly annoying these days because developers are forcing them to be active when you're playing single player.

https://areweanticheatyet.com/

Yes, but it's the usual suspects. If you literally do not play those, admittedly very popular 5 or 6 games, it's a smooth sailing.

There's an entire world outside of AAA FPS games-as-a-service that require kernel-level anticheat.

The shortsightedness of this comment makes me think that there are hundreds of comments, exactly like yours that talked about dedicated GPU’s or direct X or any other technology that was dismissed as Dan don’t worry it’s only the big guys using it.

Do you know how valve used to make games and now it makes money? What happens when EA comes up with an amazing amazingly effective and cheap anti-cheat solution? And they offer it effectively for free to all indie developers, and it just works?

I don’t care, because I switched over to console for effectively this and other reasons. But Colonel level anti-sheet absolutely must be rejected.

I'm not sure what you're saying here, and why you're criticising my comment as short-sighted. The hegemony of Valve isn't eternal? What's that got to do with gaming on Linux today?

What exactly do you want people to do? I already don't buy the games that require kernel anti-cheat, which is the only power I have over the situation. I don't like that it exists either, but the reality is that unless someone reading here is a bigwig at a game publisher (unlikely), they can't reject these methods any more than they already are.

Microsoft will eventually be able to build attestation services into the kernel that will allow third-party software assurance that no unauthorized software is also running on the same machine, obviating the need for third-party kernel-level anticheat. For security, of course.

I love when companies institute a policy that is super beneficial to them for a dozen reasons and is plainly anticompetitive and claim it’s “for security”.

Why stop there then? I could pound a nail through my SSD and now it’s even more secure…it won’t even have the opportunity to write compromising data!

For that matter, instead of wasting all this money on transistors and metal and whatnot, why not just have a piece of paper that has the word “computer” written on it? Don’t get much more secure than something that doesn’t even execute code.

But those solutions don't allow Microsoft to take your computing capabilities away and then sell them back to you piecemeal.

Yeah, I don’t really play any multiplayer games outside of Minecraft and OG Doom on my own server, so it’s never been an issue for me but I realize I am a weird case.

Always-online single-player is supremely bullshit though.

> are we anti cheat yet

While anti cheats have obvious benefits and are a dealbreaker for some, be careful what you wish for. It's a slippery slope. One chess streamer famously had to set up multiple cameras pointing at him from different angles to combat cheating accusations.

The whole windows game mod scene shows just how much of a toy operating system windows is. Game mods are changing memory values on the fly on running programs and the OS allows it. These mods can just as easily read/modify Excel spreadsheets to get business health data. This is why corporate windows machines lock everything down. Crazy.

Originally anti-cheat was to detect the running of the mods but of course now are phoning home every thing you are doing on your computer.

When the next window image manager claims windows is secure ask them to turn off the virus scanner. They will look at you like your nuts.

And mods. Yes there are work arounds to get various mod managers working on linux, but they're honestly jank. Also any mods that are windows executables (version downgraders, engine optimizers, etc) don't work, even trying to run them through wine / proton.

So now my annoyance at windows does battle with my love of mods. I know the nexus folks are working on a new cross platform mod manager, but they have yet to support bethesda games (I suspect for some of the same reasons I had issues).

I usually deal with the mods and fan patches by using Protontricks, which allows running executables within a game’s existing Proton prefix.

I'm gonna have to look into this for sure.

The only games I have modded significantly are Minecraft and Lethal Company, neither of which gave me much issue on Linux. Haven’t tried modding any Bethesda games though.

What music stuff I've tested worked on Linux, but I am also not a very demanding user in that regard.

EDIT: by Linux, I mean Linux+Proton

I play a lot of sports games and they rarely work with Linux. A ton of my other multiplayer games I play also don’t work. Anti-cheat stuff often requires Windows.

That’s fair. I do wonder if Valve has a plan to fix this at some point in the future for their Steam Decks.

This is kinda on the game developer. There are anti-cheat systems which work fine on Steam Deck already, as long as the developer checks the box to allow it (as I understand it, it is just about that simple for EAC, one of the bigger anti-cheat options). But if the dev doesn't care, or actively doesn't want to support Linux like in the case of Epic, then Valve can't really patch around that.

Sadly, there is a fundamental incompatibility between successful anti-cheat systems and Linux, mainly that the user is fully in charge of their computer. Anti-cheats work by ensuring certain modifications aren’t made to the system the game is running on, and this relies on the operating system being trusted by the anti-cheat software. With Linux, a user is in full control and can just tell the kernel to lie to the anti-cheat system, completely bypassing it. In windows, there are things the user is not in control of and the anti cheat can be sure are correct.

Until anti cheat design changes entirely (and it may not be fully possible), the freedom and control Linux provides simply doesn’t work with them.

They could conceivably just restrict it to certain kernels and checksum stuff couldn’t they? Like restrict it to the last three Ubuntu LTS releases and the last N updates of the mainline kernel?

What I don’t know about this is a lot, so I will admit I am speaking out of my ass here.

Sure, but those specific kernels would require some sort of verification method to make sure they are actually the kernel it says it is (and not a modified version pretending to not be modified) which would require code signing by a trusted third pasty, use of Trusted Platform Modules, and restrictions on what modifications a user can make to their kernel.

All of these things are pretty much non-starters for Linux users. You might as well just use windows if you are going to go that route.

I would assume the most likely solution would be that the game can only run in its own highly specialized virtual environment with its own suite of checks and memory verification.

You know, design better games.

This is just a cat and mouse game with cheat developers. You can’t design software that is perfectly able to determine that is only running in an unmodified environment. This is a form of the halting problem; any software check you do could be faked.

Windows anti cheat gets around this by using code signing and Trusted Platform Modules, which Linux would never be able to support without Linux users giving up control of their own operating system, which is not something a Linux user would do.

Unfortunately some devs have added anti-cheat solutions that check and enable game launch for Deck’s hardware specifically, while blocking desktop Linux. Which is arguably even worse

I find it frustrating too.

Only thing I can guess is, some Devs might see game support as being complicated by the many variations of Linux and not want to see those tickets.

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