Comment by Mariajaved906

16 hours ago

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.

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.