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Comment by thewebguyd | Hacker News Reader

> Many or most of those 95% who are just using Windows for PC games and using a web browser would be well served by either trying out or having a tech-savvy neighbor help them try out a Linux distro like Bazzite.

This is true until you consider what that exact casual market looks like. Mainstream casual PC gamers are overwhelmingly concentrated in live service multiplayer AAA games with kernel level anticheat. Fortnite, League of Legends, Valorant, Call of Duty, Apex Legends, etc.

So it's kind of a hard spot where yes, 95% of casual windows gamers would in theory be much better off on Linux but the Catch-22 is the games that market is mostly concentrated on is the single category that still does not work on Linux.

It's not like Windows is an OS they love, it's just a mandatory anti-cheat wall, but its a wall Linux can't breach yet.

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So, to be clear, and to really drive this point home. Gaming on Linux is absolutely viable and practical it's just the efforts are sunken by bad developers who refuse to enable compatibility or figure out a better solution.

"games that market is mostly concentrated on is the single category that still does not work on Linux."

All of the games you described have and will work on Linux perfectly fine under proton, it is the developers CHOICE for these games not to work.

> "games that market is mostly concentrated on is the single category that still does not work on Linux."

Yeah. That single category is "games that the devs have done the extra work needed to make them not run in Proton". There's no consistent game genre, age, or intended audience... it's just whether or not the dev decided that running on the Steam Deck, SteamOS, and the various Linux distros was something that they were actively going to block. [0]

[0] An illustrative case is Apex Legends. It waffled back and forth between "permitted to run under Proton" and "not permitted", and eventually landed in the "not permitted" bucket. And no, "'competitive' shooters" is not the category that this fits in because shooters like Hunt: Showdown and Counterstrike work just fine with Proton.

The service where Counter-Strike actually gets played competitively, FaceIT, does not work on Linux.

It's not terribly surprising to me that a third-party mod that requires the use of a special kernelspace program only works on Windows.

FWIW, Valve doesn't require use of that system for tournament play and is of the opinion that VAC is sufficient to run a Counterstrike tournament. [0][1]

[0] <https://github.com/ValveSoftware/counter-strike_rules_and_re...>

[1] See section 3.4 of the license you have to agree to to run an official tournament <https://store.steampowered.com/tourney/limited_license>

> it is the developers CHOICE for these games not to work.

Can you blame them if the choices they have are a) support Linux but with weak anti-cheat, or b) exclude ~3% of PC gamers?

It is my opinion that a large chunk of the legwork in anti-cheating is solved by protecting your game with adequate server-side checks and heuristics/data. Valve does a pretty poor job of this but there are plenty of games with a thriving competitive environment that does not require the use of kernel anti-cheat.

Do you have any examples? Competitive shooters are one of the worst cases because your server-side checks need to allow tolerances to make up for latency, and cannot be so thorough where they would tank performance. Data analysis can work but there's a wide range of cheating styles to catch and you wont be able to catch them before they ruin the fun for a lot of people.

Any time I am playing a game of CS I can head over to someone's steam profile and replace .com with .rip and the website will show me a breakdown of a person's stats, based on a few statistics over a few games will instantly show me if this person has red flags-based time to damage, how often they win a clutch and how good their aim/recoil control is. That already narrows down about 50% of cheaters very easily based on the past 20/30 games of data

There was also a huge regression from CSGO->CS2. There used to be a feature that would not network players if you could not see them, this was completely scrapped and now cheaters can see where you are at all times meaning that if you are closet cheating, you can always have your best player follow the bomb.

Pretty much any service with a strong client-side anti cheat then relies on manual bans for people who slip through the cracks which is the most effective system for dealing with that.

CSGO had the overwatch system but that was pretty useless for all but the most blatant cheaters

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