Biggest hurdle for me to do this is just multiplayer games. I wish Linux would offer a solution to that. No idea what it would look like though.

Contrary to most Linux advocates I’m a big believer in giving studios the tools they need to defeat cheaters and I don’t care much about system integrity if it means fairer games.

The anti-cheat creators other than Valve aren't bothered to invest into making a Linux kernel anti-cheat, and most Linux users would be unwilling to allow one to be installed either.

Totally agree, but it seems like competitive games have solved it. CS2 (VAC), The Finals (EAC), and Overwatch 2 (Warden) all run flawlessly on Linux.

The only sure-fire way to defeat cheats is with something like Counter Strike's overwatch system: have humans vet replays. Cheats are a ludicrous business, there is simply far too much incentive to defeat software-based systems.

>No idea what it would look like though.

It looks like attestation. Linux needs to be able to assure game developers that the kernel their game is running on is actually protecting the security of their game.

Well, the beauty of Linux is that anyone can go implement whatever features they want. But, I’m very happy that folks aren’t very interested in supporting this kernel level DRM stuff.

> I wish Linux would offer a solution to that. No idea what it would look like though.

It probably would have to be an isolated environment to run in. Something like the Secure VM efforts adopted for desktops, perhaps with a small trusted hypervisor instead of CPU vendor extensions. Anything else I can think of starts to restrain what software you can run on your machine, or becomes highly invasive in ways similar to Anti-Cheats on Windows, both of which would be rejected by the general Linux community. (Through, it's not like anyone was asking Microsoft either before implementing anti-cheat and trampling on system integrity, at least until Microsoft started requiring signed drivers)

However, given that a generic blackbox implementation enables DRM and binary encryption there will probably still be opposition. It gets particularly nasty if it's given access to something like a full TPM to unlock application data in the same way a TPM can unlock an encrypted drive for your OS. That would make it the penultimate closed source application, which is really anti-ethical to a number of communities. (open source, modding, game/app preservation...)

Even on Windows they are losing despite the invasive anticheats.

I suspect the answer to cheating will ultimately be big brother and hiding information from the client.

The server should stop sending positions of undetected enemies - this requires rethinking game engines due to the predictions they perform.

The server should log every single action by every single player (full replays) in perpetuity, train models on it to detect outliers, classify some outliers as cheaters and start grouping them all together in lobbies.

Another idea would be to conduct automated experiments on players at random. Such as manifesting "fake" entities behind cover and measure player reactions - of which there should be none. Spawn bots (from the beginning of the game) that a compromised client (cheats) cannot discriminate from players and have them always remain in cover and gauge player behavior relative to them, despawn them if a [presumably real] player is about to detect them.

It all requires work and imagination which is in short supply in the industry. But given how cheaters kill certain types of games maybe someone will eventually do it.

Who exactly is "Linux"? What entity, specifically, would work on kernel anti-cheat? The only realistic company who would care about this is Valve. So really you should say Valve, not Linux.

That's the biggest problem with Linux on the desktop: outside of Red Hat and Canonical (neither of whose business has anything to do with gaming), there is basically no well-funded company that cares about it at all. Linux already works great for the use cases that matter to the people who develop Linux, who mostly are not trying to compete with Microsoft or Apple.

The anticheats themselves typically do support Linux, it's the devs that don't choose to use them

they have the tools they need to defeat cheaters, they just choose to go about it in very invasive and lazy ways because people still buy their product.

then people complain when the product sucks and is invasive.

Plenty of competitive multiplayer games run on Linux fwiw.