Comment by jekwoooooe

> Besides, it's a cat and mouse game where the vendor is the mouse.

The goal of anti-cheat isn't to stop the world's most advanced cheaters. Those are already unstoppable because they now use Direct Memory Access over the PCI-E bus, so the cheats don't even run on the same computer anymore. However since those cheaters are few and far in-between they can be handled through player reports.

The goal is to stop the mediocre cheater who simply downloaded a known cheat from a cheating forum. If you don't stop those you'll get such a large wave of cheaters that you can't keep up with banning them quickly enough.

As long as games are running on user hardware/OS, you'll always deal with cheating. Server-side checks and computation can only go so far.

For example: in competitive shooters (where cheaters are most prevalent) you can't have things appearing out of thin air. The client needs to know about things ahead of time to play sounds and to give other environmental hints.

> Anti-cheat today is a stop-gap measure at best. For various reasons such as improved OS security and security concerns with this software, ring zero anti-cheat won't be around forever.

I think that traditional kernel-level anticheat is going away. But the reason is more that when CrowdStrike caused mass outage, Microsoft stated that they want to provide standard interfaces for security sensors, and forbid kernel-level access otherwise (and anticheat can be considered a kind of security sensor too).

If these interfaces become standardized then Valve/Linux could in principle implement them too.

It might be a cat and mouse game, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't be trying.

Any anti-malware software ends up ultimately being a cat and mouse game, but that doesn't mean we stop updating our signature updates.

The goal isn’t to stop 100% of cheats but the majority of them and that’s fine. Either way, it’s the only thing stopping me from playing the rest of my games on steamos.

This is where I'm at with gaming. Even outside of cheating, it's not fun to me to be dumped in a game with screaming children/manchildren. If I'm playing a game I want it to be with my actual friends. And then I don't have to worry about them running cheats because I trust them.

Once you get to match making, global ranks, etc it's just getting too sweaty and ruined by cheating/low trust/etc.

Communities with dedicated servers include anti-cheat though. Most people aren't interested in spending time moderating a player base: they'd rather just play the game. So server admins use anti-cheat.

You can see this in existing games with current games with community servers. GTA V's modded FiveM and CS2 Face-IT include more anti-cheats, not less.

Yeah, but it's very time consuming/impossible to find similarly skilled players for a fun lobby. The only competitive game I care to play on Linux is Rocket League, which is nearly impossible to cheat at, so it doesn't currently have anti-cheat, but I wouldn't be surprised if Epic decides to put their beloved EAC in it at some point anyway, maybe even just because they hate Linux so much.

They really aren’t. I used to think that but I actually enjoy skill based matchmaking. It makes game availability better and faster and I don’t have to deal with 1 outlier absolutely stomping or overzealous admins or whatever. I like both approaches though for something like battlefield I think dedicated servers are better but for things like cod, siege, etc we need sbmm

Ho do you do proper matchmaking and ranking up and progression etc with dedicated servers?

I want good balanced matches with players of my similar skill level via matchmaking.

This is especially relevant to note because Epic bought and owns Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) one of the currently most popular anti-cheats in AAA.

ETA: EAC still supports Linux gaming today, but the rumors remain that Epic could remove that at their whim.

Epic are a hostile company.

Just avoid it.

Linux definitely allows it.

And certain types of games have a _ton_ of ancillary applications. For flight simulation, I rely on 2-3 additional contollers, some of which I am fairly certain either won't have driver support, or at the very least will have some major issues with the GUI and configuration.

Then, there are things like head tracking which are either another dedicated peripheral which may or may not get drivers, or a set of apps which feed from a webcam and output the signal to a standard driver that games know to check for.

Finally, most 3rd party add-ons have custom installers, and I'm guessing most of them won't have a working Linux version. So, while I'm sure it's possible to run, say, a vanilla X-Plane on a non-Windows installation with no peripherals/apps/add-ons, I just see a mountain of work to get a normal, heavily custom installation working.

Discord is shipped in a number of package managers (I don’t know the status for mainline apt repos).

I know that this isn’t an easy solution/doesn’t go against your argument, because it isn’t download-and-run simple, but discord’s version can be modified with no consequences in a build_info.json file. I used to do it manually, back when they updated it every once-in-a-while, but due to their current tendency to push updates every few days or so, I’ve made a few-line bash script to fetch the latest version (thank you httptap) and patch the file for me. For screen sharing, I use whatever current discord client on GitHub supports it for Wayland, which usually has the added benefit of not limiting quality and framerate options.

But yes, you do have a point, it’s not just ‘as simple’ as it is under Windows - when Windows works properly.

...why? Discord is available via flatpak.

It Just Works.