alt Hacker NewsThey're pretty upfront about the reason - their anticheat supports Linux, but enabling it would make it much easier to cheat because it's not nearly as effective on there, and they decided the cons outweigh the pros.
Apex Legends went through the same issue when they enabled Linux support, cheaters swarmed to Linux en-masse because it was so trivial to evade detection even with free/public cheats, and after a year or so the devs threw in the towel and blocked Linux again.
They're not doing this out of spite, they'd be happy to take your money if there were no downside, but unfortunately it is a trade-off for games which are sensitive to being ruined by cheaters. At least for now.
Replies
Anticheat has to stop being hostile and move to zero trust client server models. Stop giving clients enough data to snipe players across the map. We can probably get someone smart enough to write an model to overlord the server and realize when someone is wall hacking or moving faster than they should be able to pretty easy - we have the compute these days.
Something has to change to move away from these rootkit antivirus like apps looking for exploits.
Hope that never changes. Linux has enough problems without invasive kernel mode anticheat malware trying to install itself on our systems.
It was bad enough that we had to put up with nvidia's proprietary nonsense if we wanted hardware acceleration. Things have finally started to improve. They have finally started open sourcing things. Now that things are finally getting better this anticheat nonsense shows up. You gotta be kidding me.
Nobody needs a bunch of game companies feeling entitled to full access to our computers. You'd have to be nuts to let game companies run ring zero code on your system. You want their nonsense absolutely contained and isolated, not deep in your kernel.
Here's a thought: they don't own our computers, we do. We own the CPU. We own the RAM. We own the motherboard. If we want to edit their game's memory while its running, it's our god given right as the owners of the machine the game is running on. Any attempt to stop us from doing so is an affront to our freedom. The mere attempt to do so with "anticheating" kernel malware is offensive. The audacity.
Cheating at video games is an exercise in computer freedom. I realize I'm defending scoundrels here and it doesn't matter in the slightest. Our computing freedom is orders of magnitude more important than video games. I want them to suck it up and accept it. That is the price of freedom. If they want to be on Linux, it should be on our terms.
Don't care about this ideological stuff? Here's the sort of risk you're accepting when you opt into this bullshit:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/fs-labs-flight-simulator-pas...
Corporation thinks its the FBI and starts shipping a browser stealer to users to "catch pirates". Bonus points for exfiltrating the data on an unencrypted channel!
https://old.reddit.com/r/Asmongold/comments/1cibw9r/valorant...
https://www.unknowncheats.me/forum/anti-cheat-bypass/634974-...
Screenshots your screen and exfiltrates it to their servers.
https://www.theregister.com/2016/09/23/capcom_street_fighter...
https://twitter.com/TheWack0lian/status/779397840762245124
https://fuzzysecurity.com/tutorials/28.html
https://github.com/FuzzySecurity/Capcom-Rootkit
A literal privilege escalation as a service "anticheat" driver!
Game companies give negative amounts of shit. If you trust them you're out of your mind.
Yeah I'd say it's not accurate to say it's the same anticheat. Only the same name. It's like saying Excel supports iPad. Except Excel on iPad doesn't support VBA, so any more complicated spreadsheet will not work.
I don't think cheaters are swarming to Linux, but part of the issue with Apex Legends is that Linux support is done through Proton, through the Windows version of the game, because there no Linux version of Apex Legends. So now you've got a backdoor for everyone on Windows to run the less secure anticheat.
Solvable maybe by having a separate Linux version of the game, but that's also more supported needed.