Comment by Arch-TK | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Arch-TK | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think Linux will ever fully take over gaming regardless of effort unless competitive multiplayer game companies decide to give up on assuming total control over your system in order to make cheaters undetectable to the average gamer*.

It would require that a Linux based OS was released which allows games companies, in a standardised way, to take full control over the system. And at this point, it won't be a Linux distro, it will instead just be like Android. I think calling that a market takeover would be similarly thin and insignificant as calling android a "Linux takeover of the mobile OS market".

But this isn't to say that Microsoft won't lose the market share to "Gamedroid" or whatever, it just won't be losing it to Linux.

* As has been demonstrated, KLA and similar technologies do help make cheating more difficult and require more resources. But, as the cheating industry's pocketbooks make clear, cheating hasn't stopped, it has just become more discreet such that most players simply don't notice when they're losing to cheaters.

I work in gamedev.

A kernel module is easier to make on Linux than on Windows.

The only person who would say otherwise has clearly never written anything on that level on Windows. It's not just uneasy: it's Sisyphean. The code-signing signature you need alone is an order of magnitude more difficult to obtain than the development burden of an appropriately defensive kernel module.

We gamedevs don't even need "full control", just a moderate amount of checking for tampering of our application memory and a scan of the proclist and device tree. It's like, not much. The reason it's in the kernel is because we need to get "under" the cheat engines so that the OS doesn't lie to us, linux doesn't make that aspect harder or easier, just different.

Easyanticheat already supports Linux if you enable it in your Epic developer settings. The limitation here is that developers know that gamers are mostly running windows so the support burden isn't worth it.

For now.

> A kernel module is easier to make on Linux than on Windows.

That's cool, but you can't enforce that the rest of the kernel hasn't been modified with that kernel module. You need a chain of trust.

> We gamedevs don't even need "full control", just a moderate amount of checking for tampering of our application memory and a scan of the proclist and device tree. It's like, not much. The reason it's in the kernel is because we need to get "under" the cheat engines so that the OS doesn't lie to us, linux doesn't make that aspect harder or easier, just different.

Windows requires drivers to be signed. Just because you wrote a Linux kernel driver, doesn't mean that when I run it, that you can trust it in any way.

> Easyanticheat already supports Linux if you enable it in your Epic developer settings. The limitation here is that developers know that gamers are mostly running windows so the support burden isn't worth it.

It doesn't support it with KLA. Bypassing this kind of anti-cheat on Linux is relatively trivial compared to windows with KLA.

> Windows requires drivers to be signed. Just because you wrote a Linux kernel driver, doesn't mean that when I run it, that you can trust it in any way.

There is a lot of signed malware for Windows.

There's not much Kernel Level malware singed in Windows (drivers have more scrutiny for whatever that's worth). Regardless, the point is that companies using KLA rely on the relative difficulty of circumventing protections implemented in a signed kernel, running signed drivers, on a machine where there is some chain of trust.

You don't need to take my word for it, Tim Sweeney said it himself (using dirty innuendos and weasel words, but anyway). EAC supports Linux, but doesn't utilise KLA (for many reasons), and doesn't make the same claims about protection as it does on Windows.

Perhaps not, but Linux desktop marketshare doubled in 2024. It is still minuscule, but it doesn't take much for a movement like this to take off. Microsoft continues to make Windows 11 impossible to install for the average user up to and including not all that rare scenarios where it cannot be installed at all.

Conversely, 15 minutes to install, fully patched, and ready to go Linux distro is a hugely attractive alternative to Windows. There are 3 viable gaming distros, and the underlying tech continues to evolve. It is already invisible to most games.

Yeah most games, except the ones which rely on KLA.

There aren't _that many_ games in that realm, but most PC gamers play at least one of them a lot.

Without effective KLA support (which would require a locked down Linux aka Gamedroid, for reasons I explain in my other comments) the best you can do is support these mostly non-competitive-multiplayer games. If you have friends who play lots of games, you'll quickly find most of them play at least one game which requires KLA.

Depends who pushes it and how - Steam (Valve) have the clout to if not to "take over gaming" at least turn it into a duopoly on the desktop/laptop from an OS point (from a game client point of view there is already Steam.....and way....over here everyone else).

I don't think anyone else does.

There isn't any technical reasons preventing it, PS5's are based on a heavily modified BSD - it requires a single vendor to standardise and support the platform with enough resources/commitment to do it properly.

Sure valve can make Gamedroid a reality, but Valve seems to be on the side of not using KLA themselves.

And, again, Gamedroid != Linux and PS5's OS is not anything like normal BSD. In both cases (hypothetical Gamderoid and current Console OSes and Windows) the game companies are granted a controlled runtime environment. Linux will not support any effective KLA without a third party providing a blessed (all drivers must be signed, secure boot, etc) distro.

The reasons are:

* PITA to support different distros (although not infeasible). * Trivial for anyone to just write their own kernel module which your KLA is blind to. * Trivial to modify how your KLA driver hooks Linux to make it blind to the cheats.

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