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Comment by dfxm12

1 day ago

You don't have to play these specific games though. I mean, what's your privacy, what's not being bombarded by ads in your OS worth to you? Have you taken an honest thought about this?

If you want to play games with friends, you have to play whatever the group plays. This is especially problematic as the group tries out new games, increasing the chance you can’t join because you’re not on Windows.

  • Personally I'd be interested to see what would happen if Sony/MS did what they could to make keyboard/mouse experience as good as possible on their consoles (I'm writing from a position of ignorance on the state of mouse/keys with current consoles) and encouraged developers to offer a choice in inputs, so that the locked-down machines can become the place for highest confidence in no/low cheaters. If other people want to pay through the nose to go beyond what consoles offer on the detail/resolution/framerate trifecta then I'm sure they could do so, but I really don't see how you lock down an open platform. That challenge has been going for decades.

    • > I'm writing from a position of ignorance on the state of mouse/keys with current consoles

      I'm far from an authority on this topic but from my understanding both Sony/MS have introduced mkb support, but so far it looks to be an opt-in kind of thing and it's still relatively new.

    • All major consoles support keyboard & mouse or similar.

      The problem is more the audience. Console players generally expect to be able to just connect the console to the TV, sit on the sofa and play with the official controller. That’s all the game are required to support to be published on the platform.

      Even if you were willing to play at a desk, you’d be matchmaking into a special (and small) mouse pool on the console game. Anyone willing to go through so much faff will accept the extra annoyances of a PC, even with kernel anti cheat.

    • Well, Nintendo's latest console comes with two mice that you can both use at the same time even.

  • This really depends on the friends you have. I've never encountered this limitation because no one in my friend group plays competitive ranked games. Basically anything with private sessions doesn't require anticheat, so Valheim, RV There Yet, Deep Rock Galactic, etc. all work fine.

    • Sure, that helps.

      But even then, when everyone is trying out a new indie game there’s a chance it won’t work on non-Windows. It’s happened to me.

      2 replies →

  • My friends are understanding that I don't play games with rootkit anti cheat (whether on Linux or Windows). There are enough games that we can play other games together still, and when they want to play the games with such anti-cheat (e.g. Helldivers 2) they simply play without me. No big deal.

    • i've read helldivers2 kernel component only runs on a normal windows install, you should be able to play on linix via wine/proton without any of that

Yes, but sometimes it is nice to socialize with other people and they might play these types of games. I don’t enjoy Call of Duty, but I’ll play it from time to time so I can chat with my brother (this is the only way to get him on the phone/microphone for some reason). I value the time I am spending with him more than a bit of privacy (in that context).

I am very pro-Linux and pro-privacy, and hope that the situation improves so I don’t have to continue to compromise.

besides ads and privacy concerns it's been such a delight not having to deal with unwanted updates, hunting phantom processes that take up cpu time, or the file explorer that takes forever to show ten files in the download folder. I cannot be paid to use windows at this point.