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.

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Fr0styMatt88 44 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

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.

	▲	zaptheimpaler 21 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Sorry but you're just old IMO :) PUBG or Arc Raiders have over 100 players in a game. Even Valorant or League have 10 players in a match. It's definitely not easy to find 10 friends to play the same game at the same time as you. And playing any of these games with a cheater can completely wreck the match. If the cheaters go unchecked, over time they start to dominate games where like 30% might be cheaters who can see through walls and insta headshot you and the entire multiplayer mode of the game is ruined. Most of us are happy to have effective anti-cheat, and it's not forced upon us. I understand the tradeoff to having mostly cheater-free games is having to trust the game maker more and am fine with that. Riot for example is quite transparent about what their anti-cheat does, how it works and I don't consider it "malware" anymore than I consider a driver for my graphics card to be "malware" even if they do operate in kernel mode.

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iknowstuff 32 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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

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jauntywundrkind 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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.