alt Hacker NewsI'm ordering a new laptop to work on LLM stuff, and while I thought about jumping through the hoops to get Linux running with secure boot...
I had a realization, it's a cold day in hell when someone else is going to tell me what I can run on my computer. All the latest multiplayer games are now requiring secure boot on Win11 as well
I'm actually wary of all these anti-cheats, they're literally hyperinvasive maleware.
I don't need gaming that much.
And if I do I'll stream it with Gamepass or another cloud service.
Replies
> I don't need gaming that much.
Counter point: gaming is fun, and indy games are worth investing in. Voting with your wallet works better if you vote for behavior that's not user hostile, rather than only abstaining.
Just to be clear, the anti-cheat systems that support Linux run at the user level and don't require secure boot. Those kernel-level and secure boot restrictions only apply to a handful of games, and they all explicitly block Linux users anyway. For example, I've been playing Arc Raiders a lot recently in Linux, and the user-level EAC works just fine.
Lots of games don't need invasive anti-cheat. You can just play those. There are literally too many awesome games on the market to ever be without something great to play.
I was in a similar situation and ended up buying a PS5. It ended up being exactly what I wanted.
All I really do on my Windows system is play games, and because of that I don't mind whatever draconian crap that's required to keep cheaters in check. It sucks, but not sure of a better solution.
I honestly don't understand why any game is even checking if secure boot is enabled.
If anything it's for the OS to care about that, not individual programs. Afaik, secure boot doesn't (on it's own) prevent the running of arbitrary software, so how is it actually preventing cheating?
I'm a pretty prolific gamer, but at the start of the year I finally kicked Windows to the curb.
It's been fine. Surprisingly few games I'm interested in to begin with have anticheat that doesn't work on Linux, and it's comforting to know games aren't allowed to just shove trash into kernel space at will.