Is HDMI really a roadblock to gaming when DisplayPort exists?

Does AMD not support Display Port? I'm not an expert on this, but that sounds to me like the superior technology.

Anticheat is one of those things where I probably sound really old, but man it’s just a game. If you hate cheating, don’t play on pub servers with randoms or find a group of people you can play with, like how real life works.

For competitive gaming, I think attested hardware & software actually is the right way to go. Don’t force kernel-level malware on everyone.

Yeah this is also the model Microsoft is moving to. A separate attested vm for games, immutable to the rest of windows.

This seems both semi probably but also like maybe a bit of a critical moral hazard for Valve. Right now folks love Valve. They do good things for Linux.

Making a Valve-only Linux solution would take a lot of the joy of this moment away for many. But it would also help Valve significantly. It's very uncomfortable to consider, imo.

If you want to play games with friends, you have to play whatever the group plays. This is especially problematic as the group tries out new games, increasing the chance you can’t join because you’re not on Windows.

Yes, but sometimes it is nice to socialize with other people and they might play these types of games. I don’t enjoy Call of Duty, but I’ll play it from time to time so I can chat with my brother (this is the only way to get him on the phone/microphone for some reason). I value the time I am spending with him more than a bit of privacy (in that context).

I am very pro-Linux and pro-privacy, and hope that the situation improves so I don’t have to continue to compromise.

besides ads and privacy concerns it's been such a delight not having to deal with unwanted updates, hunting phantom processes that take up cpu time, or the file explorer that takes forever to show ten files in the download folder. I cannot be paid to use windows at this point.

What percentage of games require DX12? From what I recall, a surprisingly large percentage of games support DX11, including Arc Raiders, BF6 and Helldivers 2, just to name a few popular titles.

At the same time, Vulkan support is also getting pretty widespread, I think notably idTech games prefer Vulkan as the API.

That's being addressed:

    - https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/directx12-performance-is-terrible-on-linux/303207/432
    - https://indico.freedesktop.org/event/10/contributions/402/attachments/243/327/2025-09-29%20-%20XDC%202025%20-%20Descriptors%20are%20Hard.pdf
    - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TpwjJdkg2RE

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

Sure, except that anyone can just compile a Linux kernel that doesn't allow that.

Anti-cheat systems on Windows work because Windows is hard(er) to tamper with.

That would require that they actually make the effort to develop Linux support. The current "it just works" reality is that the games developers don't need to support running on Linux.

> After all, the most played competitive shooter is CS and Valve has does not use kernel-level AC.

Valve doesn't employ kernel AC but in practice others have taken that into their own hands - the prevalence of cheating on the official CS servers has driven the adoption of third-party matchmaking providers like FACEIT, which layer their own kernel AC on top of the game. The bulk of casual play happens on the former, but serious competitive play mostly happens on the latter.

The competitive CS leagues do use AC though. The big issue for these games is the free-to-play model does not work without anti-cheat. Having a ~$20 fee to cheat for a while before getting banned significantly reduces the number of cheaters, and that's what CS does with their prime server model.

And for what it's worth, I'm pretty sure Valorant is the most played competitive shooter at the moment.

Isn't it pretty much an open secret that JVM-based cheats can trivially bypass VAC?

Yeah. MS must have been so hurt about losing to the iPhone, they really jumped the gun on AI as if to avoid a similar mistake. It's Satya's major play and I think they are already paying for that decision. xbox is hollowed out so that AI can be funded, while the pc/console hybrid project is doomed to fail because "windows everywhere" doesn't work if windows is crap. indeed, they might be left with just the cloud business in the end.

"Totally blinded by Azure and AI and stock price growth."

Stock price growth is their core business because that is how large firms operate.

MS used to embrace games etc because the whole point was all PCs should run Windows. Now the plan is to get you onto a subscription to their cloud. The PC bit is largely immaterial in that model. Enterprises get the rather horrible Intune bollocks to play with but the goal is to lock everyone into subs.

They don’t care, they’re defunding Xbox and even the Windows team is hollowed out.

If people were buying new PCs every year like they used to I'd be worth it. Turns out there isn't as much value having a "captive market" on a PC unless it's locked down.

But when Steam started to develop Proton, WINE was 90% there! Valve only had to provide the remaining 90%.

The strength of Linux and Free software in general is not in that it's completely built by unpaid labor. It's built by a lot of paid, full-time labor. But the results are shared with everyone. The strength of Free software is that it fosters and enforces cooperation of all interested parties, and provides a guarantee that defection is an unprofitable move.

This is one of the reasons you see Linux everywhere, and *BSD, rarely.

Money and resources suddenly materialized once someone realized that there was profit in it is pretty much the expected way this goes. OpenTofu happened not because of some OSS force of will but because a group of companies needed it to exist for their business.

This flow is basically the bread and butter for the OSS community and the only way high effort projects get done.

Exactly. Battlefield 6 for example does not work at all in Proton.

This is a far better user experience for Battlefield players than in Windows.

Have you ever actually attempted to play that half-assed buggy piece of shit?

if you are running KDE you can whitelist Steam for remote desktop work, this is because of wayland.