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Comment by andai | Hacker News Reader

A friend of mine, a Linux user, says he installed Windows for gaming. Apparently the main issue isn't actual compatibility for games, but that a lot of games require some kind of kernel level anticheat (rootkit?).

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It’s a few games, but a few very important ones.

GTAVs online ecosystem with custom servers. Rust hasn’t enabled Linux Battleye support. Valorant

Some releases that are temporarily popular like BF6, playtest of Battleye games where Linux support isn’t enabled (Fellowship, Exoborne). All games in this paragraph also by Swedish developers. Kom igen, linuxstöd

Some intrusive ones (EA's anti cheat for recent Battlefields, Activision's anti cheat for Call of Duty, anything from Riot to name a few) do not work.

However, EAC - who is a major player in this field producing generic solutions - does support Linux. The involved publisher, however, needs to approve this and the developer need to turn on a feature flag. That's it.

However, some publishers simply deny this for... totally mental reasons ...and this means that the game is marked as borked in protondb even though the game could as easily be played on Linux thanks to EAC's Linux support.

"EAC supports Linux, but devs just won't turn it on" is the clickbait answer, but the details are more nuanced. EAC has multiple security levels that a title can set based on the threat model of the game, and most games with heavy MTX that use EAC shy away from it, largely because Fortnite doesn't do it. EAC is owned by Epic, and if Tim Sweeney says that you can't do MTX on Linux safely, then any AAA live services game with in-game MTX is going to shy away from it, regardless of how true the statement actually is.

The Finals has mtx, is protected by EAC, and is playable on Steam Deck.

Throne and Liberty, which is also protected by EAC and has mtx, is also playable on Steam Deck.

So this is bullshit and it clearly shows it's the publisher's choice. What Sweeney thinks has nothing to do with it.

> What Sweeney thinks has nothing to do with it.

I don't know if this is a fever dream or if it actually happened, but I seem to recall reading something about Tim Sweeney using Linux for a week to see how it compared. If he liked it, Epic Megagames would publish titles w/Linux support. He ended up complaining about some irrelevant things in KDevelop and it was pretty clear what his intentions were before even trying things.

I can't find any reference to this online, but I'm pretty sure that it happened. This would have been ~1998.

edit: It may have been Mark Rein?

no it shows those guys are willing to take the risk and learn the water is fine.

most aren't

This. While EAC does support Linux it is nowhere near the level of protection of EAC on Windows.

"MTX" as in, microtransactions?

What do microtransactions have to do with anticheat?

You don't want someone having a skin that you are charging money for among other things.

granting clientside without paying, things like that

You are only safe if you run Tim's rootkit :)

Yes, this is broadly true. Just about everything that does not have Linux-disabling anticheat runs wonderfully on Linux these days. You can check https://protondb.com/ to see how any given game runs.

Yep anticheats are one of the big hurdles to 'porting' a lot of online focused shooters to linux. It's an unfortunate situation but I get it from the company's perspective, not having any anticheat leads to shitty situations for way more players than not having a linux version of their anticheat and a vast majority of players have Windows devices or are willing to dual boot.

Yes. Valorant and Battlefield 6, for example.

This is true. Battlefield 6 is in this boat

Escape from Tarkov is the only reason I have a Windows Hard drive still. It doesn't have anything else on it.

EFT has a pretty ridiculous history with attempts at anticheat. Several years ago they set up their servers to kick anyone with virtualization enabled because cheaters had been using VMs to intercept network traffic (the network traffic wasn't encrypted for tarkov then). The response from cheaters was to use a seperate bare metal build to intercept the traffic. The devs "fixed" it right before windows 11 came out with virtualization on by default.

FWIW, PvE and modded Tarkov does actually run fine on Linux (Streets map doesn't, nor does Arena).

It's definitely not the same, but between Arc Raiders and PvE I get my extraction shooter fix. Online Tarkov is mostly populated by Gaming Wizards™ anyways.

Yes I am playing Arc Raiders now instead of Tarkov because switching is not worth it. Until it will be!

Yes and they could just make it(the rootkits) work on linux. It's more about the publishers/devs actively opposing linux.

Alternatively it's still a pretty small slice of the market that's not willing to dual boot for the major games that do require windows only anticheats so it's just not worth their dev and support time to try to serve that small slice. Valve's work on Steam Machines/Decks is the thing needed to actually push developers to supporting it by providing a relatively consistent target OS and a large enough install base to justify spending the money to support.

The major anti-cheats do support Linux, but it's opt-in on the dev side because they're significantly easier to bypass than the Windows versions. It's not even close, getting around the Linux ACs is child's play. It sucks but nobody really has a good solution yet.

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