Comment by 9x39
17 hours ago
Finding a way to get the multiplayer studios to get Linux support for their competitive games like Valve does could crack a wedge in the market for mainstream users to get in, particularly in those who don't want to pay the Windows tax (not everyone is willing to experiment or go unlicensed).
I can't prove it, but the Steam Deck has probably torn down a lot of barriers for mainstream use among the crowd that care about the game more than the OS. Getting some of the other games (League, Vanguard, Warzone, BF6, etc.) or whatever is popular in those segments onboard might be the critical mass that justifies fixing all the rough edges that get fixed when a big pile of users are represented.
Anecdotally, it took less time for me to install Devuan (not even one of the “easier” distros) and steam and start downloading games on a new machine than it took me to figure out how to decrapify vanilla win 11 after first boot.
If you want statistics, Linux’s gaming market share is 2x that of MacOS.
The barriers to gaming on Linux have never been lower. They’re certainly much lower than the barriers to running windows games on windows were back in the Win 95 - XP SP2 days (when I jumped ship).
Yeah, anti-cheat support is probably the biggest barrier right now. The Steam Deck already showed that many gamers do not really care about the OS as long as their favorite games work smoothly.
I can’t see it happening until valve adds some kind of trusted compute environment. I’m imagining online games could have a flag which enforces secure boot, boot chain attestation, and disables multi tasking features. So while you are playing the game it becomes a single task device, but after you quit it’s fully unlocked again to do whatever you want.
This is the main problem why anti cheats are currenty blocking SteamOS.
I don't think you'd need to block multi tasking though, but the kernel would need to prevent or tamper root access so it couldn't modify the game memory.
You can't block multitasking, the largest multiplayers have huge crowds who play with friends and talk on discord.
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Valve doesn’t do kernel level anti cheat on Windows either. Those are the actual roadblocks.
Userland anti cheats can work (and do) on Linux if the developers want to. Most of the third party ones the developer buys/licenses already do.
But reality is that only the kernel level ones seem to work to some extent. Difference in the amount cheating between counter strike and valorant is just massive (both free to play games)
Yeah, user-space anti-cheats just aren't as effective. We need kernel-level anti-cheats on Linux, and more. I understand these are considered invasive, but people care FAR more about cheaters than they do the extremely remote possibility of a zero-day exploit.
Quite the contrary. I care about the OS and that’s why I switched to Linux gaming. The experience wrapping the game is just so much better.
Sure, but the point is that Windows gamers generally do not care.
In other words, no one is going to refuse to use Linux out of loyalty to Windows, as long as all the games they want to play work.
Arguably, the PS2/3/4/5 proved that as did the various Nintendo platforms.