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Linux is now the best gaming system. ｜ fernvenue's Blog
blog.fernvenue.comWhen it comes to gaming on Linux, many many many people’s understanding stil remains in the Jurassic era. For the past few years, I’ve been using Linux as my main operating system for both work and gaming. From my personal experience, the gaming experience on Linux is far superior to that of macOS and Windows. I know I know…whenever I mention this, there are always some old-school individuals who come out to say that Linux’s driver configuration is complex, its game support is not rich enough, and its compatibility issues are significant, among other problems. In this article, I will directly address these issues and let everyone understand how much the gaming experience on Linux has developed by 2025.
Well…it has the opportunity to be. More native integration and/or wine fixes for certain issues, and anti-cheat being allowed would definitely put it on track to be there.
Anti-cheat is allowed. There are a handful of anti-cheat systems that can’t work on Linux, but IIRC, they are in the minority.
They are the minority, but have large player bases. Eliminating that barrier would mean that Linux devices (not just desktops) would be a one-shot win for most consumers.
personally, I’m really glad they are not writing kernel level rootkits disguised as games for Linux yet
Which is why it won’t ever happen (anti cheat allowed). Microsoft makes sure of that with $$$ to those devs that refuse to support Linux.
This is not a thing.
Yep im waiting for windows kernel emulation or some other techniques to fool it to think it’s on windows. Honestly I want to break client side cheating to the point they have no choice but to go back to server side cheat detection.
Yup. It’s a cat and mouse game until server side can become enconomial enough to broadly deploy (computational & network constraints).
Yeah but still cheating doesn’t give game companies the right to Rootkit my computer and have ring 0 access.
I’m aligned on this. Server side ought to be the way.
Also fuck cheaters.
Nobody left server side cheat detection. Client side is a complement to it.
Server side detection simply won’t do the job by itself to the degree the bigger games need (which is effectively replicating a locked down console environment). The only real alternative is running the entire game server side. If you’re ok with cloud gaming (or at least with running nothing but the renderer and the controller input client-side) then maybe it can be done, although it probably would require some type of subscription service to compensate for the skyrocketing server costs. Otherwise I don’t think so.
Nearly all competitive multiplayer games run this way. The client is an untrusted rendering service, while the overall state of the game world is tracked server side.
It really depends on the game. For things that are fundamentally PvP with a bunch of players, sure. 1v1 games sometimes use a bunch of other solutions and if there are big PvE components things may get complicated.
And that’s why I said “maybe” up there and why I went with cloud gaming as the default. Rendering on client means you can still do all sorts of crap in terms of wallhacks, spoofing inputs and so on. I really wonder how safe even cloud gaming would be. Could you do effective autoaim with just a rendered frame fast enough? I bet somebody would try.
Hell, in some cases the cheating isn’t even on software these days. CS had a big argument about some keyboard behaviors recently, as did fighting games about leverless sticks enabling certain shortcuts. I genuinely don’t know the current state of affairs around those these days.
The solution for this that’s now in vogue is server-side occlusion checking. Basically, map what objects/characters that player has line-of-sight on server-side, and send the client only data for those which are visible.
This exists - it’s usually done with a microcontroller that intercepts the monitor feed, scans nearby the player’s cursor or center-of-screen for probable targets, and softly fuzzes mouse movements towards that target.
Yep, 100%. That’s why root-level AC is a bad option: cheaters are just switching over to these out-of-band techniques.
Companies prefer root-level AC because it gives non-technical stakeholders the impression that a game is “cheat-proof”, and therefore, that they don’t need to fund customer support to monitor and review reports of cheating. They’re not using root-level, client-side AC because it’s more effective than alternative options.
Not the case in my experience. Nobody is backing out from server-side checks and nobody is spending a ton of money either developing or purchasing anticheat to appease “non-technical stakeholders”, such as they are. Technical directors and technical leads exist. You won’t convince a random executive with a grumpy engineer in the room saying things are a waste of money. And that’s assuming your decisionmakers are “non-technical” in the first place. Plenty of studio heads came from engineering.
Game developers have metrics for cheating, they’re not making it up, and as far as I can tell you get better results on PC by doing both than just one. Worse, when you don’t have tight enough anticheat players can feel it, too, which is ultimately the only thing that matters.
As I was telling someone below, the goal of anticheat isn’t to fully secure the game. No game is fully secure. But it matters to make abuse onerous because it’s a very different experience to go from multiple cheaters a game to a cheater every multiple games. Trivial cheating that average players can access is a dealbreaker.
Riot Games is a perfect case study where this exact thing happened, IMO.
League of Legends had millions of MAU and a near zero incidence of cheating, for a ~13-14 year span. They implemented root-level AC for their next game, Valorant, and they ran into aimbot problems within weeks. Root-level AC was rolled out for League a few years later, despite vocal objections from their developers, several of whom were vocally against the move on r/leagueoflinux.
Overwatch is another example of a super-popular game that manages to stay cheater-free using only heuristics and player reports. They’re doing dramatically better at stamping out cheaters than Valorant, CoD, and other comparable games that include root-level AC.
Are there any counterexamples where you’ve seen a game struggling with cheaters fix the issue with root-level AC? I can’t think of any, but maybe my gaming pool is just too narrow.
Riot games is not a game. You’re saying LoL had “zero incidence of cheating”? That is… a bold claim. Ditto for Overwatch.
Your sample is both narrow and inaccurate.