Latest 30 Comments

I see both sides of this argument. I get that kernel access anti-cheat is a serious "trust me, bro" situation. I also play both Counter-Strike 2, and Valorant regularly. One of those games is flooded with cheaters, and the other has basically none. In competitive online games you can't have cheaters. It fundamentally breaks the game experience.

Valve understands both parts of this. I hope their intelligent minds are at work engineering a solution for this technical problem in Linux. I would love to be able to delete my Windows 11 partition for good. Val is the only reason I have to keep it.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Bottom's up friends! Time to go back down for another round.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

One question, could we not just sign the linux kernel and other parts, so that the anti cheat program would know that nothing has been altered? I am thinking about something like steam hosting a list of trusted hashes and that any company that is trusted by steam can push new hashes for theier compiled linux kernels there.

If kernel "protection" (or any client side system) is required to ensure people don't cheat, then how come there are so few billionaires ? After all, one can easily access their bank account without installing any rootkit kernel anti-cheat.

Game devs need to stop caring about what the client do and start caring about what their server receives, just like every other online service.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

I think it's fairly likely what will happen in the next 2-3 years is they'll make EAC work on Steam OS

@mattaraxia EAC already works on SteamOS (Proton). For instance, I play Fall Guys online (which uses EAC) and it works just fine. There's a whole bunch of other EAC games which work fine too from what I've heard, such as Brawlhalla, Sea of Thieves, Dead by Daylight etc.

In fact many other anticheat systems also work on Proton, such as BattlEye, nProtect Gameguard, VAC etc. Sure, they may not work at the kernel level and offer the same level of "protection" as on Windows, but the options are there. It's up to the studios/developers to enable support or switch to a compatible anticheat - if they care about Linux.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

I wouldn't be surprised if, like the Deck, this comes in a few tiers. In that scenario, the specs we're discussing would be the low-end tier, and people's concerns would be addressed by the higher tiers.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Ah, thanks!

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

This is an excellent game, not much else to say about it.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Personnally, I have a 4k tv and still play in 1080p. From 10feet away, I hardly see the difference. Unless you have a 70inch display in your living room, which I don't because I don't have enough space, 4k, just like RT, is pretty overrated, imo.

Edit: Thinking about this, I'd choose 144hz before 4k.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

It might not be the most powerful thing on the market, but neither is the Steam Deck, and yet this is the one that's getting all the attention, despite not being sold anywhere but on Steam digital store!

I have concerns about the Steam Machine hardware that I never had about the Deck hardware. The newer GPU architecture and the low res of the screen of the Deck were chosen to hit a specific performance target. The Steam Machine is going to be plugged into a 4K TV, and the components were picked to hit a specific price. I think the lack of RAM and lack of VRAM are going to hurt it from the off, and definitely in the medium term.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

This honestly couldn't come at a better time. I have an ageing middle range gaming computer and I was more and more leaning towards HTPCs for its replacement as I don't have a lot of time to play anymore and a mid-tower PC takes a lot of space.
I have yet to buy a Steam Deck, and Valve announces this?

Steam Controller will be a day one purchase, and I'll certainly replace my tower PC with a Steam Machine. It might not be the most powerful thing on the market, but neither is the Steam Deck, and yet this is the one that's getting all the attention, despite not being sold anywhere but on Steam digital store! And as my PC is old, it will still be better (especially CPU wise, which is what matters the most in the end for longevity). I have 1080p monitors so GPU will be largely enough. Depending on the price, this Steam Machine could end up being an absolute banger, just like the Steam Deck is! I suspect they will use the same market penetration technique. Sure, the Steam Deck is not the most powerful handheld, but it's also half the price of others...

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

And, surprisingly, even though it's using Unreal Engine 5 most of the early reports on it have been quite positive.

This makes me wonder about the state of play in game engines. I mean, the two majors have been Unity and Unreal. Unity had its bit of, um, controversy a while ago, that pissed a lot of people off. And I see a lot of people with the opinion that the latest Unreal sucks. So where does that currently leave most game developers? Do they seem to be just shrugging and living with it? Are they increasingly kicking the tires of Godot? Are other engines seeing growth? What's going on?

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Just watch this ;)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AsTcv792DBA

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

No, that wouldn't . . . wait . . . thinks . . . thinks . . . OH! Right, I'm tacitly imagining that the mouse somehow "knows" its absolute position, but of course that can't be (well, short of a GPS thing in the mouse, which would be kind of overkill), so . . . huh.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Yeah, but than moving your arm left to right won't draw a horizontal line in let's say GIMP...

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

The name gave me a chuckle.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Is cachyOS working easily out of the box with old windows games if you tried any?

@Jahimself they have two packages that will pull in basically everything you need to play anything outside of dosbox, which in itself is easy to install if you need it.

 $ pacman -S cachyos-gaming-meta cachyos-gaming-applications 

This will set you up nicely should you decide to go with Cachy.

src: https://wiki.cachyos.org/configuration/gaming/

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

I didn't even know the mouse had an orientation. Goes to show what kinds of games I (don't) play. 'Cause like, in normal use, it doesn't matter how you twist the mouse around, the cursor arrow or whatever still points the same way. I didn't know the verticality of the mouse ever mattered at all for anything, or was even detected.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

i installed ubisoft connect on lutris, but the launch button from the store doesn't do anything. what am i supposed to do to get the launch link to to launch ubisoft connect?

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Heck yes!

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Now I only need an easy way to rotate mouse sensor in Linux...


I don't understand that...

There is a mouse driver called Raw Accel on Windows and it allows to "rotate" mouse sensor. Not everybody holds mouse in perfect vertical position. Very helpful in FPS games.

YeetMouse (https://github.com/AndyFilter/YeetMouse) aims to replicate this, but I just don't know how to start GUI :P

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

The rocks shall be stoned!

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

@Eike, because than the other gamers will come and visit your house when you cheat.
I prefer Kernel anti-cheat personally.
Also permabans can be more perma.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

How sim-heavy are these games ? I'm highly interested in a good Rally game, as long as it's fun with a controller and doesn't require the steering wheel etc.

Open to other Rally game recommendations as well

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

For Linux / SteamOS fans, going by ProtonDB the early reports there are nice and positive too with multiple reports on it working great out of the box with Proton.

For how long?

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

@Purple Library Guy
On an AMD machine this actually makes sense.
See the primary problem with your solution is that it's still hard to confirm that you run what you think you're running, but AMD's competitor to SGX actually works with mini kernels in vms.
The real question is. Wouldn't it be easier and just as good/bad to dual boot? Maye its cheaper, Windows is expensive.

Edit:
Correction it would be easier on an AMD machine this feature I just referenced does require exactly 0 reboots.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Say, by modern standards of file sizes, the kernel isn't actually very big, is it? So OK, this is kind of ludicrous, but . . . imagine that the Linux version of Easy Anti-Cheat or whatever DOWNLOADED A CUSTOM KERNEL every time you started logging into the game, and you played the game (and only the game) on that, probably in a sandbox of some sort, and it would get deleted after your session was over. And the custom kernel would be constantly changing so they could tell whether you were using the latest one (and then, yeah, EAC's servers got hacked and malware got put in, but that was only that one time ).

I mean, clearly it would turn the "rootkit" problem up to the max, but from the game developers' perspective it would be the most trustable anti-cheat in town. And you'd have to wait for the download every damn time you wanted to play the game, but . . . if the kernel is pretty small, it wouldn't be that bad.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

Im willing to be infinitely more patient with indie game jam title that hits it big and suddenly has more exposure than they were expecting than I am with a AAA title that has spend hundreds of millions of dollars generating buggy garbage.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

@Uso, @Shotm7 and many others who suggest custom kernels as the solution.
Custom kernels are the problem, because people can legally and practically make their own kernel, make it return whatever they want and install it on their own device.
Anti-cheat makers, which are people who are defending against the owner of the device their software is running on don't trust the kernel to help defend against its master and on Windows Microsoft at least attempts to claim that title on Linux a principled stance has been taken to not claim that title.
Yes even signed kernels are treated as suspicious UEFI level cheating already exists.

Feature wise Linux wins all the rounds in anti-cheat.
Acceptable KASLR, tainted kernels, great hardware security modules integration, etc.
This just doesn't matter, because one could've and probably someone has made a kernel that showed all the signs of having these features, but didn't actually help.


If you ask me the technical solution isn't in the Kernel at all.
It's in the things the anti-cheat developer does trust: the development tools and the trusted execution environments.
To express this belief I hereby release [EASLR(Executable Adress Space Layout Randomization) under the gplv2.1](https://codeberg.org/Informeli/EASLR).


Edit:
Yes, I value this freedom flowing from this principled stance too and the lack of monopolistic power originating from it.
As such EASLR doesn't stop anyone from modifying anything on their computer.
It hampers undetectable mass distribution of this capability on the specific programs we're trying to protect.

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

It might be worth grabbing this just to run the in-game benchmark?

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment

This mod is really the best for Heroes 2. It brings to the game every little quality of life improvment brought by Heroes 3 and the community patches. The perfect way to play Heroes 2 for me, and it's one of the great episode of the serie (with great soundtrack).

View this comment - View article - View full comments - Report this comment