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Comment by 9x39 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Arguably, the PS2/3/4/5 proved that as did the various Nintendo platforms.

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.

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.

It isn't about blocking anything, remote attestation confirms the system is in a particular configuration, but it doesn't actually block you from doing anything you want. The "locked down" part just means that running any unapproved programs or system configurations would lock you out of the game. So as long as the game servers recognized discord as an approved program you could run it while connected to game servers.

Yeah, playing an audio book in the background while I game is my default mode of play now.

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.

Looking at someone cheating in a replay, it's pretty obvious the majority of the time. To me, this signals that this could be a problem that can be solved by a combination of analytics to filter out statisticaly outliers + AI. This is something Valve dabbled with before (and since) the boom in AI [0], dubbed as VACNET and VAC-LIVE. Kernel access becoming the norm is not something we should be cheering for imo.

I'm more sceptical about inference based detection methods because as they improve (using AI), so too will the cheater's ability to fake human movement. It will be trained on real humans and mimic how real humans play - just at the very high end of the range of skill and ability. Developers will be loathe to ban "good" players just because they're good.

If cheaters were capped to mimicking good players, that's already an incredible win over the status quo. The players that are walling (as an example), are playing with more information than they should and this should always be detectable with enough observation, especially in terms of them displaying super-human reaction times and being pre-positioned to their advantage... so I'm not quite as pessimistic as you are about this not having good returns.

I'm sure there's a reason why they don't, but I wonder why games don't try implementing honey pots, like rendering a fake player behind a wall and automatically banning if a player's crosshair snaps onto them, etc.

It's true that it would be an improvement. I should not let perfect be the enemy of good. Your honey pot ideal is one of many solid ways to detect cheaters. Developers appear more interested in selling copies than they are ensuring players have a good time. Perhaps the motivation is more aligned in subscription games, where they care about the recurring revenue.

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