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Comment by 0xC0ncord | Hacker News Reader

According to ProtonDB[1], about 7-10% of the top 100 and top 1000 games are "borked", but the actual reason why can be nuanced. However, these days it is almost always anti-cheat.

[1] https://www.protondb.com/dashboard

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Another way to look at this is that practically all games work well on Linux, unless the developers try very hard to make it not work on Linux.

Anti-cheat will be basically impossible to overcome until studios specifically cater to linux. I'm not sure to what extent this is even possible given how hackable linux is, and how many variants there are, but it's plausible a blessed distro with a signed kernel (somehow? Not sure if this is a thing) might support it.

With a signed kernel and secure boot it should in principle be similiar to Windows 11? But with DMA based hacks on the rise I'm not sure it matters either way.

Anywhere I could read more about the DMA attacks?

You can probably look up DMA cards. They plug into a PCIe slot and get full access to inspect and modify memory.

So, Game Genie for 2025?

Which is the same reason that we lock the data centers. If someone has physical access to the hardware, there are so many more breaching vectors.

Peripherals get IOMMU'd on Apple platforms

https://support.apple.com/guide/security/direct-memory-acces...

Not so on Linux?

Some anticheats like EAC, GameGuard, XingCode do have Linux support that the game has to opt-in. I believe it is not kernel-based and is not Linux-native. Many non-competitive games do allow them.

At least I know that Helldivers 2 (GameGuard), DJMax Respect V (XingCode), Fantasy Life I (EAC) do works on Linux.

I wish that if they're happy with non kernel mode anti cheat on Linux, just do the same in Windows... Or just disable them if I don't use public matchmaking

EAC is owned by Epic, but they won't enable it on their own games, because they don't want to make it easy for people to use Steam. They want Epic Games to used for more than collecting free games and launching Fortnite.

Kernel-based on Linux is pointless unless SacureBoot is used with fixed vendor certs (you can still SB custom kernels on most consumer mobos). I believe that only Microsoft exists in the default certs, so impossible for all intents and purposes. Otherwise you can modify the kernel (or Wine/Proton) and do what you want.

Windows has the same issue, but isn't open source and easy to modify. Still, EA are so paranoid that they require it there.

It will be easy to overcome once they realize how much money they are giving up. Easy solution with little investment would be to separate linux and windows users, just like with consoles, but the correct solution is to do things server side and that's what i am wondering about

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