Quoting: LungDragoThe problem with messaging apps is that they're useless without the user base. I might be willing to switch to a more private alternative, but the general user and really all of my friends couldn't care less and they have no reason to switch when they're happy with what they're using now.

I get what you mean, and I agree when it comes to purely messaging apps, it took me the course of a year to sucessfully move the people I care about to use Signal. People are just brainlessly married to their trendy apps and services for some reason. I blame social norms for this, if you don't use WhatsApp then you must be a maniac, to give another example.

But I don't believe this applies to Discord, I think the only reason Discord is in the position its in is literally because it's the only one of its kind, like there's no serious competition from anyone at all. Also, I don't think users are actually happy with Discord now, I can list a lot of drawbacks off the top of my head, it's just what people know and are used to.

Quoting: LungDragoI guess Steam has a unique position that would allow it to compete with Discord if they wanted to. In fact, I reckon the reason why Discord is as popular as it is now is because Steam's tools for messaging have historically been kind of ass and Discord filled the void. It would still be very difficult for Steam but at least doable compared to some open source alternative that's dead on arrival.

I really believe Steam has the potential to become the better "game chat" service, I mean most of the functionality is there already, even the screensharing part I mentioned in my first comment is already a thing with Steam broadcasting, it's just not integrated with the chatting part of Steam. So I think it's actually trivial for Valve to make their chatting service a real alernative to Discord. If that were to happen, then at that point, if my friends would still want to stick to a shitty service that requires monthly subscription to be remotely not inconsistent, while the free alternative is better and is already included in the game store they already use, then I don't know what will convince them otherwise. I might be a doctor but I can't treat brain rot.

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Still can't believe there's no proper privacy friendly alternative to Discord. Matrix/Element is the closest I found but even that one is not there yet. You'd think with the amount of devs and nerds out there, there'd be an open source alternative already, especially considering Discord is an absolute privacy nightmare. But instead they all just use Discord. It's the only invasive service I couldn't find a replacement for yet.

Speaking of, I just tried Steam's voice chat service for the first time ever on my Deck to chat with a friend... and it was immediately better than Discord's VC (audio quality, latency, stability). Steam even has a similar rooms structure where you can create text and voice channels akin to a Discord server. Unfortunately it's missing the crucial function of screensharing, this is something me and friends use a lot on Discord, so there's no chance in hell they'd consider switching over with that not implemented. I reckon after Valve is done focusing on Game Recording, that they should revisit and improve their chatting system, it has a lot of potential, especially considering the competition is just one shitty company that literally breaks GDPR by refusing to completely remove your data when you delete your account.

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Quoting: Jarmerthere's always a ton of comments that go "fine I'll just switch to linux then" but of course that's just a lot of talk.

It's the same crowd that goes "I'll switch when they release SteamOS!1!11!!".

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How's the flatpak these days? Would prefer to switch to the flatpak as I'm liking the concept of keeping the OS as "clean" as possible.

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I wonder if I should get it now, or maybe it'll get an even deeper sale later on. Won't be playing it anytime soon anyways, just want to grab it before the price increase when it leaves early access.

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Quoting: LoudTechie

Quoting: Pyrate

Quoting: pleasereadthemanualThere are only three ways to beat the Anti-Cheat problem:

1. Force the game developers to weaken their anti-cheat for your system (not going to happen with the current number of players)
2. Start cryptographically verifying kernels and bribe a bunch of game companies into supporting those particular kernels. This also does not seem likely to work long-term.
3. Cloud gaming...

Would kernel verification really be satisfactory for these anti-cheat companies? Why isn't that a thing already?

It's how they do it on Windows currently(yes, this has issues), but whether or not it's satisfactory is the "convincing" part @pleasereadthemanual mentioned.
It's a thing already it's how Android and Apple do it(Android's version is slightly more complicated, but it also does this).

Difficult to implement?

yes(It's cryptography, market politics, infosec and hardware design combined), but most of it has already been implemented by the AOSP(android open source project), the trusted computing group, Microsoft and hardware manufacturers.
Some distros even have packages with signed bootloaders(for secure boot).

I don't mind if all it takes to prove I'm "safe" is just checking if my kernel comes straight from Fedora unmodified, doesn't sound like an issue st all for me.

You don't many others with a lot of power in the Linux space do.
Remember these people wrote their own compiler, kernel, bootloader and bios, just to be able to change on their computer whatever they want.
Read the website of the FSF to get a sense what these are capable of to achieve this.

The reason they will probably give first is Tivolisation. The trusted vendor will find themselves in a dominant position and start exploiting that position by implemenenting more api's that only they've(cough, cough, google play services and safety net), so nobody else will be able to run any program that can run on their platform and thus make them the only game in town(yes, microg exists, but that is just wine for android).

Also would you be willing to give up most of to all of your distro's packages for this, because the current package managament system on most Linux distros(yes, also Fedora) gives everything installed through it root(flatpack and snap are attempts at fixing this, but we're still far away from a good local package manager)

And if one uses custom kernels, then I think an easy solution is to just have the distro's official kernel installed alongside the modified kernel, and whenever one wishes to play one of those spyware games, just reboot into the distro's kernel and play the game.

Good point especially with "Game Mode" already existing.

In summary what would be needed for this:
A major distro or vendor(like Valve) needs to implement measured boot on their distro, convince some anti-cheat providers to use it and convince some games to trust it.
Secure boot isn't enough, because it only proofs to someone with physical access to the device that the kernel is trusted.
This is supported on both ARM an X86(_64).
Also the players should be willing to risk tivolisation.

Contrary to @pleasereadthemanual I don't believe these to be the only three possible ways, but that is worth its own post.

Many thanks for the breakdown. I thought with kernel verification, what I meant was just something simple like checking cheksums or something (you can tell I'm no programmer), but if it's going to have to be like Windows/secure boot/Android's awful safetynet system, then fuck no lol. What I had in mind was basically sacrificing one kernel slot at worst, but these solutions? Absolutely not.

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Quoting: pleasereadthemanualThere are only three ways to beat the Anti-Cheat problem:

1. Force the game developers to weaken their anti-cheat for your system (not going to happen with the current number of players)
2. Start cryptographically verifying kernels and bribe a bunch of game companies into supporting those particular kernels. This also does not seem likely to work long-term.
3. Cloud gaming...

Would kernel verification really be satisfactory for these anti-cheat companies? Why isn't that a thing already? Difficult to implement?

I don't mind if all it takes to prove I'm "safe" is just checking if my kernel comes straight from Fedora unmodified, doesn't sound like an issue st all for me.

And if one uses custom kernels, then I think an easy solution is to just have the distro's official kernel installed alongside the modified kernel, and whenever one wishes to play one of those spyware games, just reboot into the distro's kernel and play the game.

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Unfortunately Game Recording left a bad taste on deck for me. Was playing E2M2 of DooM yesterday with a friend, and after dying 2 times because it's a difficult level we were basically at the end, and I thought to try the new recording function, so I hit the shortcut and my deck immediately just crashed and rebooted... I'll just keep the feature disabled for now.

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Still waiting on how they're gonna tackle anti-cheat stuff.

Since they're into crypto and "web3", I'm also waiting for the inevitable rugpull.

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I guess 1 roguelike spinoff wasn't enough.

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