[PaulKeeble]

I think its interesting that mainstream PC gaming press is now talking about Linux. We have the benchmark Youtube channels doing some benchmarks of it as well and plenty of reports of "it just works", which is pretty promising at least for the games that aren't intentionally excluded by DRM. For me its still controllers and equipment incompatibility due to my VR headset and sim wheel/pedals setup, I use Linux everywhere else in my router and home servers. I just hope that Nvidia notices that there does appear to be a swing happening and improves their driver situation.

[fooker]

The last remaining roadblock is kernel level anti-cheat frameworks.

Pretty horrible technology, and unfortunately a good majority of the gaming industry by revenue relies on it.

[MegaDeKay]

I'd say there are two remaining roadblocks. First and biggest is kernel level anti-cheat frameworks as you point out. But there's also no open source HDMI 2.1 implementation allowed by the HDMI cartel so people like me with an AMD card max out at 4K60 even for open source games like Visual Pinball (unless you count an adapter with hacked firmware between the card and the display). NVidia and Intel get away with it because they implement the functionality in their closed source blobs.

[coppsilgold]

Competent cheat makers don't have much difficulty in defeating in-kernel anticheats on Windows. With the amount of insight and control available on Linux anticheat makers stand little chance.

The best Valve could do is offer a special locked down kernel with perhaps some anticheat capabilities and lock down the hardware with attestation. If they offer the sources and do verified builds it might even be accepted by some.

Doubt it would be popular or even successful on non-Valve machines. But I'm not an online gamer and couldn't care less about anticheats.

[dfxm12]

You don't have to play these specific games though. I mean, what's your privacy, what's not being bombarded by ads in your OS worth to you? Have you taken an honest thought about this?

[hparadiz]

The Linux kernel has eBPF now so if they wanted to start spying on everything you do they can just do it.

[observationist]

Pirate everything. Stop feeding beasts and they have no power.

The idea that you need intrusive surveillance in order to make games fair is absurd. If you need fair games, you need referees and moderation, which means you need to train and pay competent people and establish open and transparent rules and tools. You can also give your refs latitude, so if someone is obviously cheating, they have the power to do something about it. You should also require and implement publicly transparent and auditable actions with recourse for players to prevent abuses of power.

That's expensive. It's much easier to create a terms of service with vague guidelines, implement a totally intrusive, absurdly invasive rootkit that does some bare minimum scanning for known cheats and patterns, which establishes an arms race and provides bad actors a nice little point of ingress when the responsible company inevitably fails to protect their users competently.

Just like media platforms, if you cannot moderate at the scale at which you're operating, then it shouldn't be legal to operate at that scale.

People should stop giving money to companies that don't deserve it. No game is worth sacrificing your integrity for. "Just trust us, we know what we're doing" is a huge red flag, and it should be criminal to do what they do.

AI refs are going to be a very real possibility in the near future that can be just as fair and competent as humans, so the "necessity" for rootkits won't be a valid argument for much longer. It'll still be expensive, but multiplayer gaming fairness shouldn't ever serve as a reason for nuking privacy.

[marcyb5st]

I always wondered. Isn't exactly what eBPF would allow you to do?

Assuming that cheats work by reading (and modifying) the memory of the game process you can you can attach a kprobe to the sys_ptrace system call. Every time any process uses it, your eBPF program triggers. You can then capture the PID and UID of the requester and compare it against a whitelist (eg only the game engine can mess with the memory of that process). If the requester is unauthorized, the eBPF program can even override the return value to deny access before the kernel finishes the request.

Of course there are other attack vectors (like spoofing PID/process name), but eBPF covers them also.

All of this to say that Linux already has sane primitives to allow that, but that, as long as devs don't prioritize Linux, we won't see this happening.

[jsheard]

Another unresolved roadblock is Nvidia cards seriously underperforming in DX12 games under Proton compared to Windows. Implementing DX12 semantics on top of Vulkan runs into some nasty performance cliffs on their hardware, so Khronos is working on amending the Vulkan spec to smooth that over.

[mrheosuper]

I am wondering can game be shipped with their own "kernel" and "hypervisor", basically an entire VM. Yes performance will take a hit, but in my experience with my own VM, it's like 15-20%.

[drnick1]

Clearly, when there will be enough Linux gamers another solution to the kernel-level anti-cheat issue will be found. After all, the most played competitive shooter is CS and Valve has does not use kernel-level AC.

[kgwxd]

How does their revenue rely on it? People won't buy/recommend their games if they can't solve a fundamental problem, without full control over the machine their product is running on? Then they can change their business model and/or game mechanics. Simple as that. The only reason that blatant security violation was ever considered a viable option is because Microsoft gave them the ability to actually do it with the click of a button. Those companies can adapt, or die.

[einpoklum]

But is that really a roadblock?

First, let's ask ourselves how many PCs have users play games with anti-cheat frameworks. I'm absolutely no expert, but if it's more than, what? 10%? let's even say 20% - I'd be surprised.

> and unfortunately a good majority of the gaming industry by revenue relies on it.

Well, it used to be the case that game makers relied on copy protection in floppy discs, and movie distributors on DVD/BluRay copy protection. Conditions changed and they adapted.

[amelius]

Isn't it a more fundamental problem? I can imagine a cheating setup where you have a separate PC with a HDMI capture stick ("analog hole") and access to the controllers.

[markus_zhang]

I actually think it’s better to exclude the AAA games from Linux.

[eru]

Well, if you go by revenue, mobile gaming dwarfs all else.

[pjmlp]

And native GNU/Linux games instead of depending on Windows.

[hhh]

Games being playable also rely on it.

[necessary]

This is a big reason I’m excited for Steam Frame - high quality VR on the Linux desktop.

[pjerem]

AND high quality Linux desktop on the VR :)

[ErroneousBosh]

Gaming now works better on Linux than it does on Windows. This must be upsetting for Microsoft, but it was their game to lose.

[voidfunc]

I dont get the feeling they care. Microsoft is so lost under Satya at this point. Totally blinded by Azure and AI and stock price growth. At some point they're going to realize all the ground they've lost and it's going to be a real problem. They're repeating a lot of the same mistakes that cost them the browser and mobile market.

[threethirtytwo]

The irony is that gaming on linux got better but the instigator was not the OSS community. All of it was funded by closed source software competing with other close source software. The OSS community by itself did not have the conviction to climb over this bulwark.

[jetbalsa]

This still has a "sometimes" on it, there are more then a few games that need magic proton flags to run well, nothing you can't go look up on protondb, but lots of games you would want to play with friends might have some nasty anti-cheat on it that just won't let you play it at all.

[spockz]

Gaming works fine with exception of things like BF6 that require kernel level anti cheat.

The one thing I haven’t been able to get working reliably is steam remote play with the Linux machine as host. Most games work fine, others will only capture black screens.

[tombert]

Proton has gotten so good now that I don't even bother checking compatibility before buying games.

Granted, I don't play online games, so that might change things, but for years I used to have to make a concession that "yeah Windows is better for games...", but in the last couple years that simply has not been true. Games seem to run better on Linux than Windows, and I don't have to deal with a bunch of Microsoft advertising bullshit.

Hell, even the Microsoft Xbox One controllers work perfectly fine with xpad and the SteamOS/tenfoot interface recognizes it as an Xbox pad immediately, and this is with the official Microsoft Xbox dongle.

At this point, the only valid excuses to stay on Windows, in my opinion, are online games and Microsoft Office. I don't use Office since I've been on Unixey things so long that I've more or less just gotten used to its options, but I've been wholly unable to convince my parents to change.

I love my parents, but sometimes I want to kick their ass, because they can be a bit stuck in their ways; I am the one who is expected to fix their computer every time Windows decides to brick their computer, and they act like it's weird for me to ask them to install Linux. If I'm the one who has to perform unpaid maintenance on this I don't think it's weird for me to try and get them to use an operating system that has diagnostic tools that actually work.

As far as I can tell, the diagnostic and repair tools in Windows have never worked for any human in history, and they certainly have never worked for me. I don't see why anyone puts up with it when macOS and Linux have had tools that actually work for a very long time.

[pjmlp]

As long as Valve depends on the Windows ecosystem for content, they are quite safe.

Game studios will keep buying Windows and Visual Studio licenses, target DirectX, and let Valve do whatever they need for game content.

[HumblyTossed]

They asked AI and it told them they needed to focus more on AI instead.

[fxtentacle]

The Quest 3 works offline with ALVR streaming over a private (non-Internet connected) WiFi network. Together with my 3090 I get 8k @ 120fps with 20ms latency over a WiFi6e dongle. I had to manually install the dkms for the dongle on PopOs, but apart from that it just works. ALVR starts SteamVR and then I use Steam to start the game. Proton seems to use Vulcan for rendering.

[gloomyday]

Overall, I had a pretty bad experience with ALVR. I never managed to figure out the cause of stuttering on mine. I wished Meta would support Linux.

[bilekas]

> I just hope that Nvidia notices that there does appear to be a swing happening and improves their driver situation.

I firmly believe that Nvidia doesn't want the general public to ever have better hardware than what is current as people could just run their own local models and take away from the ridiculous money they're making from data centers.

In step they're now renting their gaming GPUs to players with their GeForce now package.

The market share for Nvidia of gamers is a rounding error now against ai datacenter orders. I won't hold my breath about them revisiting their established drivers for Linux.

[kouteiheika]

> I firmly believe that Nvidia doesn't want the general public to ever have better hardware than what is current as people could just run their own local models and take away from the ridiculous money they're making from data centers.

You're underestimating them. They don't even want rich professional users to own hardware that could compete with their datacenter cash cow.

Take RTX 6000 Pro, a $10k USD GPU. They say in their marketing materials that these have fifth-generation tensor cores. This is a lie, as you can't really use any 5th-gen specific features.

Take a look at their PTX docs[1]. The RTX 6000 Pro is sm_120 in that table, while their datacenter GPUs are sm_100/sm110. See the 'tcgen05' instructions in the table? It's called 'tcgen05' because it stands for "Tensor Core GEN 05". And they're all unsupported on sm_120.

[1] - https://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/parallel-thread-execution/#rele...

[dijit]

I’ll keep repeating it: the more people vote with their wallet, the more game companies will deploy Linux - including the anticheat.

EAC has the support for Linux, you just have to enable it as a developer.

I know this, I worked on games that used this. EAC was used on Stadia (which was a debian box) for the division, because the server had to detect that EAC was actually running on the client.

I feel like I bring this up all the time here but people don’t believe me for some reason.

[ThatPlayer]

> EAC has the support for Linux

This does not mean it supports the full feature set as from EAC on Windows. As an analogy, it's like saying Microsoft Excel supports iPad. It's true, but without VBA support, there's not going to be many serious attempts to port more complicated spreadsheets to iPad.

[arwineap]

I'm surprised to hear you are having trouble with wheels / pedals, we should be there already!

https://github.com/JacKeTUs/linux-steering-wheels

Hopefully vr headset support will get better

[Fr0styMatt88]

Funnily enough the most annoying things on my system at the moment is RGB and keyboard/mouse customisation.

I haven’t found a tool that can access all the extra settings of my Logitech mouse, not my Logitech speakers.

OpenRGB is amazing but I’m stuck on a version that constantly crashes; this should be fixed in the recent versions but nixpkgs doesn’t seem to have it (last I checked).

On the other hand I did manage to get SteamVR somewhat working with ALVR on the Quest 3, but performance wasn’t great or consistent at all from what I remember (RTX 3070, Wayland KDE).

[rounce]

For VR support Monado works very well for me with both Pimax (base-station tracked) and WMR (inside-out tracked) headsets.

[hinkley]

When that steam deck clone came out and games played better on SteamOS than on Windows on the exact same hardware, it woke a bunch of people up. Microsoft scrambled to bring the startup time and footprint down but shots had already been fired.

You don’t want a vendor you have to publically shame to get them to do the right thing. And that’s MS if any single sentence has ever described them without using curse words.

[Trasmatta]

I've got the Legion Go S with Steam OS, and that shit is great. It's stable, my games run well, the OS is pretty much entirely in the background, but I can still access it fully if I need to. Love it.

[scrollop]

What might help is if AMD or Nvidia take the gamble and create decent drivers and advertise Linux compatibility, driving up sales, forcing their competitor to do the same.

[creesch]

AMD has very decent drivers on Linux which are even open source. It is one of the main reasons people recommend people go with AMD cards for Linux.

[HumblyTossed]

I thought it was just my bubble, but I guess you're right, it does appear Linux is being talked about more in the mainstream.

[desireco42]

My VR glasses work on Omarchy, to my surprise, I plugged them and they work. I have XReal, older model.

[MSFT_Edging]

Aren't the XReals just displays in the glasses? If they work with other devices, it's no surprise linux can just use a display standard.

[johnnyanmac]

>which is pretty promising at least for the games that aren't intentionally excluded by DRM.

Sadly, those exclusions are pretty big asks for the common folk. That's always what it comes down to. Some killer tool you need for whatever reason that either doesn't work on Linux, or is severely compromised.

I'm very comfortable with Linux, but my work still requires Unreal Engine. And good luck getting that going in Linux. So I'm stuck with dual booting at the bare minimum.