Posted by haunter 11/2/2025
Contrary to most Linux advocates I’m a big believer in giving studios the tools they need to defeat cheaters and I don’t care much about system integrity if it means fairer games.
It looks like attestation. Linux needs to be able to assure game developers that the kernel their game is running on is actually protecting the security of their game.
It probably would have to be an isolated environment to run in. Something like the Secure VM efforts adopted for desktops, perhaps with a small trusted hypervisor instead of CPU vendor extensions. Anything else I can think of starts to restrain what software you can run on your machine, or becomes highly invasive in ways similar to Anti-Cheats on Windows, both of which would be rejected by the general Linux community. (Through, it's not like anyone was asking Microsoft either before implementing anti-cheat and trampling on system integrity, at least until Microsoft started requiring signed drivers)
However, given that a generic blackbox implementation enables DRM and binary encryption there will probably still be opposition. It gets particularly nasty if it's given access to something like a full TPM to unlock application data in the same way a TPM can unlock an encrypted drive for your OS. That would make it the penultimate closed source application, which is really anti-ethical to a number of communities. (open source, modding, game/app preservation...)
I suspect the answer to cheating will ultimately be big brother and hiding information from the client.
The server should stop sending positions of undetected enemies - this requires rethinking game engines due to the predictions they perform.
The server should log every single action by every single player (full replays) in perpetuity, train models on it to detect outliers, classify some outliers as cheaters and start grouping them all together in lobbies.
Another idea would be to conduct automated experiments on players at random. Such as manifesting "fake" entities behind cover and measure player reactions - of which there should be none. Spawn bots (from the beginning of the game) that a compromised client (cheats) cannot discriminate from players and have them always remain in cover and gauge player behavior relative to them, despawn them if a [presumably real] player is about to detect them.
It all requires work and imagination which is in short supply in the industry. But given how cheaters kill certain types of games maybe someone will eventually do it.
The speed of light makes this _marginally_ problematic to do. It is possible that a unit might move out of the fog of war, or out of cover, during the latency to the client (or between server ticks). You'd effectively have pop-in during some scenarios - but it would be minor and the net benefit would probably make it worth it.
I recall one of the MOBAs adding this during its lifecycle, HoN I think?
Their settled solution is still not perfect, hence still the need for client-side anti-cheat. The final video clip is definitely done to look effective than it actually is. Those positions are transmitted based on space, not time, and in a real game you'd be moving slower.
Mobas generally have a lower tickrate and simpler vision setups
What I had in mind is having a primitive physics simulation with point clouds (+ velocity smearing) for entities and geometries for surfaces. You will be able to to do many more checks this way.
That's the biggest problem with Linux on the desktop: outside of Red Hat and Canonical (neither of whose business has anything to do with gaming), there is basically no well-funded company that cares about it at all. Linux already works great for the use cases that matter to the people who develop Linux, who mostly are not trying to compete with Microsoft or Apple.
It's a game and it is Tony Hawk, but it's not really comparable as Tony Hawk on PS1.
then people complain when the product sucks and is invasive.
I've been running Fedora at work for about 6-7 years now too, with few issues. Work binned Adobe XD and moved to Figma which has made it even more viable.
The one and only holdout I keep a Windows 11 install around for is VR. With Valve's new headset due to release any week now, we will hopefully have a bunch of Linux SteamVR patches on the way to sand the remaining sharp edges off.
That’s a deal breaker for me, I tried a fresh Bazzite install (from Arch) before giving up, exact same issue.
I wish Valve comes around one day and fixes that, I’ll kick Windows out of life in a heartbeat.
For example, a couple months ago, my install of TW:WH3 started to crash after 20-30 seconds in the main game. I think it started happening after a minor patch. Another example is Battle Brothers. The game ran flawlessly. Then I installed and played a copy on a Windows laptop using the same Steam account. After that the game stopped booting properly on Linux. (Maybe a coincidence.)
As a result, I still boot into Windows now and again to play these games. I am dual-booting.
Stopped dual-booting for games and formatted the partition some time after Windows 7 EOL. Thank you Wine contributors, Valve and lord Gaben.
Meanwhile Wine fixed 32-bit OpenGL path performance problem in new wow64 mode, so now you don't need 32-bit Linux dependencies to run 32-bit games in Wine anymore (that affects DX7 games for example that run through OpenGL via WineD3D).
After trying Bazzite for a few weeks around 1.5 years ago, I was pleasantly surprised but the (back then) poor state of nVidia support was an issue. I went back to the Windows 10 partition with the intention of switching over for good once the support ran out. I went a few days past that date, but seeing this article yesterday evening made me pull the trigger. Made a CachyOS USB stick, swapped the NVME out for a fresh one (the 3080 was blocking it and the release springy thingy on the PCIe connector was almost inaccessible, grr) and it's been smooth sailing. I'm also trying not to install Chrome at all this time, let's see if I manage.
I was keeping my games in a separate drive already, so when I mounted it and told Steam to look there, it just recognized everything and let me play right away!
It also exposed me to a new shell (fish) but that didn't go well. I ripped it out within seconds when the tab completion picked up files NOT matching what I had already typed, WT actual F? I'm sure it's configurable but screw that.
I thought the auto-complete in that shell they use was neat, but I made a typo and it kept autocompleting that typo and I’m about to do the same as you lol.
I’m having wifi issues with my setup for some reason when it’s perfectly fine in Windows, so I need to diagnose that or switch back to windows until I build a new PC with a more Linux-friendly hardware.
That's always been positioned to me as the one for hackers and experimentalists. You'd think the more 'user-friendly' distros would be higher.
I thought so too, that's why I mostly used Ubuntu up until 22.04 sometime, used Ubuntu since I moved before that. Then I moved to Arch, and everything just got so much easier. Upgrading Ubuntu versions was a bit hit-or-miss, especially if you'd changed configs for one reason or another. And after 22.04>22.10 failed for whatever reason, I restarted with Arch then never looked back.
Probably it helped that I already knew Arch by the time I started using it, compared to starting to use Ubuntu coming from Windows and not knowing squat.
But now with an installer, good defaults, and a helpful community (maybe slightly controversial) I think Arch can be a pretty good beginner OS, as long as you want to understand how your system is put together.
- Rolling release, so you don't have to do a major upgrade twice a year - which would otherwise be much more often than Windows.
- Latest kernel and graphics drivers, so it works with newly released hardware with the best performance.
- Steam, NVIDIA drivers, H.264/H.265 codecs, Gamescope, GameMode, MangoHud, etc. all in the default repos - a huge boon for new Linux users compared to having them in an external repo like RPM Fusion or having to install them manually, which can otherwise cause confusing dependency problems over the life of the installation.
- Nothing unusual about it that would be confusing or cause compatibility problems. It's just a normal mutable binary distro with a normal package manager, upstream packages, glibc and systemd.
The biggest issue is the lack of an official graphical installer, but while the install process is intimidating, it's not very difficult for people who are patient, can follow detailed instructions, and have a vague idea of what a partition and a bootloader is.
I think this is one of the main reasons CachyOS has been on such an upward trajectory. It's mostly Arch, but that installation was such a breeze. A couple of clicks and done.
I wonder how much of that is "hackers and experimentalists", versus random gamers* preferring Arch Linux's bleeding-edge latest-and-greatest packaging approach versus Ubuntu's seemingly-slower-paced development?
* though I suspect even the most casual 25% of PC gamers are probably significantly more tech-savvy than the average PC user of the population in general.
Install is (now?) relatively easy as well and there's enough of a community around it.