It's also worth noting that Steam brings in some of the tactics of the untrustworthy world of commercial software. By requiring the installation of Steam to install games purchased through Steam, they are forcing the installation of a marketing tool. While Steam may be mostly benevolent at present and they have made enormous contributions to Linux for gamers, it doesn't change the fact that they are using their position to sell people more games when they go to launch a game. It also doesn't diminish the possibility that Steam could integrate user-hostile features at any time. (Remember, there was a time when Google was considered benevolent.)

Unfortunately steam also limits library usage to one person at a time. For those with hundreds of games, this is very limiting nowdays if you have a family. I switched to GoG whenever possible.

Steam actually has a family share feature, and while you "can't" play games if your library is being used by someone else, you can just go into offline mode to bypass that. So if you want to play single-player games, that works pretty well.

This is my #1 complaint with Steam. I have 3 kids in the house on the family share thing, and if any one of them plays a game it locks everybody else out the entire library. I don't think Valve understands what a family is.

I think Valve's definition of a family is one guy who owns a whole bunch of different computers that he wants to flit between. Maybe this is what family is to a Valve employee? I don't know.

Most streaming services allow a small but reasonable number of concurrent connections. Usually around 5. Why does Valve insist on locking out my library of games that I paid for when one person has a game open? It makes no sense.

I wouldn't complain if the rule was you couldn't have more than one copy of a particular game open (maybe have an option to buy multiple copies for the library?), but if someone is playing L4D2 they shouldn't lock someone else out of playing HalfLife 2.

I'm aware and that's a bug, not a feature. If you are online and go Offline with the explicit button (instead of unplug the cable) and actually keep the cable connected (not sure if LAN or internet at this point) and start a second Steam client and use the library (not sure if online or offline for the second one), the offline one will not be able to use the library because already in use.

The workaround is, indeed, pull the cable or firewall steam, go offline, plug the cable.

So the concern becomes "what if the protection becomes stronger".

I used to live somewhere with terrible internet. Offline mode seems to work about 10% of the time and your better off pretending it doesn't exist.

I think you can also use steamcmd to download games? Not sure about launching.

I tried looking into this a couple of years back, and it looks like Steam has to run in the background for games that link to a library that offers Steam integration. I concluded that continuing to research a path that offered an uncertain conclusion was too much trouble, then switched to purchasing games from DRM-free vendors. The end result is saving a lot of money. Alas, that didn't correspond to a diminished amount of time spent gaming.

I did say I use Windows for gaming, I don't think I said I couldn't switch but you have the right idea. I haven't tried Linux gaming in some time (ages). At a base level I don't mind having Windows for certain things, such as gaming and using Win or Mac for some media workloads.

If they could just stop with the egregious overstepping I'd be pretty okay with using Win for gaming, accounting and a few other things. I'll likely have Win around for the foreseeable future, not just me in the household :)

I appreciate the update on Linux gaming though, haven't really looked in a long time.

As someone who stuck with Windows begrudingly for game support (but was comfortable with Linux), Valve's Proton is basically black magic. I ended up running pop_OS! (Ubuntu) as my main OS for a solid year or so before selling my desktop. The fact you can play GTA V at 60 FPS like it's nothing is pretty mind blowing. Even more surprising was the ability to play Final Fantasy 14. Primarily because I expect anything with a custom launcher to be dead on arrival with Linux. If you find Windows frustrating, I highly recommend trying out pop_OS! just since everything Just Worked out of the box, even VR

It's still a bit rough around the edges, as the best compatibility is found in community Proton forks you need to install manually, plus the need for out-of-tree drivers and non-standard bluetooth module config flags to get game controllers to work reliably.

(OTOH, you're stuck with a similar driver mess if you want a DualShock or JoyCon on Windows, so w/e)

But it's gotten a lot better than it used to be.

> (OTOH, you're stuck with a similar driver mess if you want a DualShock or JoyCon on Windows, so w/e)

Recently bought a PS5 controller and while not supported natively on either Linux/Windows, Steam does pick it up without any configuration (on both OS:es).

It's really leveled up my PC gaming experience: I get the same feeling as playing on console with the freedom of PC.

The last PlayStation I owned was a PS3, so my experience is admittedly a bit rusty.

The need to manually install proton seems to mostly be out of the way these days. Their release schedule (within steam) has gotten a bit better. Though, I can imagine for bleeding-edge games you'd still need to do this for a month or two before steam includes that new version of proton.

Persona 4 e.g. (which prompted me to go down the GloriousEggroll rabbit hole) is hardly what I'd call Bleeding Edge, it's a dusty port of a Playstation 2 game.

Even for single player games it's never certain everything will work and with multi-player there's too many that don't. At any rate, I barely game and it's still super disappointing when the random thing I want to play turns out to not quite work.

> Even for single player games it's never certain everything will work

100% compatibility isn't guaranteed for Windows either, you can always get screwed by random driver bugs.

For that, you need a console.

I don't understand why anti-cheat requires invasive software. Encryption can be used to communicate with the server, and the server can then authenticate the client's state. The application itself can use tokens to prevent the user from prying in its address space via a rigged kernel.

Not sure why you are being downvoted for not understanding and asking a question to fix that, as the matter is relevant to the post you replied to...

Essentially anti-cheat code needs that level of access to detect/circumvent cheat enabling code that has that level of access - it is a protracted arms race. There is money and kudos to be made through gaming, so people will cheat by any means necessary.

You can't remotely prove the entire state of the client unless you entirely control the client, and no current OS can offer the level of sandboxing required to offer that assurance. If you can't 100% trust the state of the client then no transport level encryption and such will fix that - you are just guaranteeing the faked data is transported safely at that point.

Of course that level of control being required for single player games is much more dubious, so there is a grain of truth in the more tin-foil-hat sounding theories about identity tracking & such on the part of the publishers.

Anti cheat is the excuse used to collect saleable or exploitable private data, and as a mechanism to perpetuate walled gardens. Centralizing accounts and identities to enforce ban lists, associate payment methods, target advertising, enable microtransactions, and so on are the reason for the security theater.

Rent seekers will extract as much cash and time from players as can be gotten away with.

Server level ban lists and competent game referees and volunteers could be a powerful answer to the problem, but there's not a lot of incentive to innovate away from rent seeking, as the big studios and stores crush any threats to their success.

Server level ban lists and competent game referees could perhaps solve this for high level play, but there’s no way you could scale that out so that the average player of a first person shooter doesn’t have to deal with cheating. That said, I’m not really a fan of things like Vanguard if for no other reason than it’s not clear that they have helped much beyond making cheats somewhat more expensive but not enough to be much rarer.

It’s also worth noting that multiplayer games without anti-cheat have had centralized accounts and microtransactions for a long time, so I’m not sure I understand how the anti-cheat measures are furthering those.

Ideal solution is to make "cheating" impossible by design rather than by trying to ensure trust.

Don't send the data player is not supposed to know. Don't trust clients to just tell the server what happened. And - I realize this is extremely controversial - ideally don't design games on pure reaction speed, visual acuity and mechanical dexterity where a sophisticated enough machine would consistently and unpreventably beat any human.

I believe we should be able to compete with bots just like we're able to compete with humans - and not because bots are handicapped and constantly toss coins deciding if they want to let the puny meatbag win.

I'm curious if there are any special tournaments where "cheats" are encouraged and even required, not prohibited. Would love to see a FPS where you have all the software aid you can think of. Texture hacks become enhanced vision aids (server may toss a coin and enforce camouflaging by not sending any information, though), auto-aim is smart munitions (so we don't compete on whoever has the faster hands or a better mouse -- see, it's already a competition of machinery!), last-seen markers and sound source visualization are tactical HUDs, and if you want some other feature you're free - as your competitors - to implement it. Naturally, if that's based on an existing game that would require heavy re-balancing of its rules (e.g. nerf of one-shot-kill weapons or buff for supports so in a teamplay they can save their teammates from such weapons). That would be a whole next level e-sports, true to the name.

> And - I realize this is extremely controversial - ideally don't design games on pure reaction speed, visual acuity and mechanical dexterity where a sophisticated enough machine would consistently and unpreventably beat any human.

What games, other than turn based strategy games or puzzle games, don't have the property you list here? And even then, you can absolutely cheat at chess. Like it or not, people want to play shooters online.

> What games [...] don't have the property you list there.

A game of almost any genre doesn't have to be designed purely on those neural and mechanical skills.

(And puzzles are actually a bad example, as many can be unimaginatively played by a machine, and machine typically wins in terms of the computing speed. Unlike a complex strategy game where bots don't necessarily dominate human players.)

My previous comment had even hinted at how a FPS could be designed to not depend on one's eyesight difference, sleight of hand or gaming chair performance. If everyone has a perfect aimbot by design, tactics and teamplay (if that's a team game) becomes a deciding factor in a shooter. If everyone has a helper AI that alleviates mundane clicking you don't have to put your mouse on fire doing that 9000 APM micro - the actual strategic thinking and planning ("macro" rather than "micro") makes more important in winning a tower defense or RTS game.

I'd wish I could just write a whole implementation idea, but I'm no game designer. I just believe that things could be designed and balanced in such a way. I can be wrong, but I don't think it's proven yet (given the modern status quo of "don't you dare think of any aids or tools but those game designers have very very explicitly allowed").

It's just that most games out there were never designed for this so their gameplay becomes extremely unrewarding, as there would be a huge imbalance if everyone is mechanically perfect. Which is probably why there is no cheaters' competitions.

Maybe I'm thinking about a different genre, something like first-person-shooter-but-not-FPS?

I wonder if more low tech solutions could work. What if you added random short screen blackouts or unexpected lags and see if perfect input still comes through. Anything that a human would react to but a bot won’t.

If your shooter intentionally drops frames or adds network or input lag, nobody is going to want to play it. This is the genre that generates most of the consumer demand for > 60 Hz refresh rate monitors.

This is so incredibly wrong, I'm not sure why you come to a forum and lie openly like this. Anyone who has reversed modern anti-cheats will disagree with this statement.

Maybe they take advantage of it but no it's not just an excuse. 10+ years ago hacking in games was very common and annoying.

This is true also for other SW. Now everybody has telemetry and services running with elevated rights. I think the future is to treat these programs as malware.

This is incredibly wrong. One of the main USPs of the service that I'm working on right now, fastcup.net, is a third-party anticheat. People use our service exactly because they trust our anti-cheat to provide a better value than what CS:GO has by default.

"Thanks" to competitive gaming involving real money incentives these days, cheats have reached the level of custom PCIe cards directly accessing kernel memory via DMA.

So a kernel rootkit is the bare minimum to try and detect these attacks, preventing them isn't even on the table any more.

In the distant future, you might be able to bypass it with hardware-authenticated homomorphic encryption, but that's still way off.

The client can just lie about its state.

The only solution that is deterministic would be to move all rendering server-side. You could guarantee a fair match as long as participants are within some reasonable distance to the server.

Note that this has other massive benefits if you can build for it natively...

> server can then authenticate the client's state

I'm sorry, but how exactly would it work? Do you mean that the server would authenticate the whole memory of the client's process, a few hundred megabytes at least, in order to make sure that there's no code that switches alpha of the wall textures to 0 every 5th frame, for example?

That has always be the promise behind Trusted Computing, yes. Maybe in another 20 years Intel will actually deliver a reliable implementation of it.

Doesn't require it. Anticheat for multilayer could all be done server-side, by peers (started by vote), on demand or by peers on demand; all by just checking the player could do what their client claimed to do.

It's just event logging and replay.

But checking drivers and secure connections is easier.

Event logging is irrelevant if you have incorporated certain optimizations into your game.

For instance, many forms of netcode necessitate revealing slightly more information to players than you otherwise would want to. The world coordinates of player footstep sounds is almost certainly some information flowing across the network.

All you would need to do is intercept this information on the network and view it on an entirely decoupled system in a 3d coordinate space - potentially one synchronized to your player character using similar snooping tactics. Valve has done a pretty good job at making this harder with asymmetric encryption, but its still something the client can ultimately decode or otherwise you wouldn't hear shit during a multiplayer match.

Trying to lock down/validate the actual gamer's PC is a fool's errand. Just go back to first principles in information theory to see what a joke this is. If a certain fact made its way to a player's computer (or simply their home network), you should assume that they know it in the most adversarial way possible and model for that outcome. Obfuscation is just playing yourself in the long run.

How does checking if the client claimed to do something possible answer questions about if the player had the skill to actually do what they could have possibly done?

Because many cheaters do things which are impossible. This is low hanging fruit that we're told we need a ring0 driver to have access to EVERYTHING. Stupid things like tracking other players through walls. Still common because it's so damned easy. You play back their events and you see the cheater always knows where to go, where to hide. There are also exploits. These can all be unit tested away.

But there are cheats like kickback compensation, hitbox tracking. You can apply statistical models and find unlikely consistency but it's hard to say for certain.

How do you "use tokens" to prevent prying in its address space?

Gaming is great as long as GNU/Linux keeps pretending to be Windows.

I rather have the original deal without additional layers.

As you apparently already know WINE/Proton is just for games that are not available in native Linux versions.

My own Steam library is packed with games (thousands of them with many thousands more available for purchase at any given time), and very few of those require the use of Proton, but it sure is nice to have available, since it adds the ability to play games which would otherwise bit-rot there in my library.

Windows and game consoles raise a couple of thousands more and pay to see the cards, if we are playing quantities game.

If on the other hand we are playing the quality card, or what everyone else is actually paying for, then down Proton it goes.

Isn't ironic that while most Android games are NDK based, so basically ISO C, ISO C++, OpenGL, OpenSL, Vulkan, they don't get ported to GNU/Linux?

Or Stadia ones for that matter (regardless of its possible future).

All fair points, but honestly? I fully expect comparability layers to be at least somewhat flawed and I adjust the way I do things accordingly. Game doesn't work 100%? Whatever, I have other games to play.

At the end of the day, I don't want to reboot just to play a game. I personally don't see the need to be a comparability purist here.

Is there any collector site that states what titles are Linux compatible and what are not? I'd like switching and gaming is keeping me from it.

Browsing to all developer studios websites for my favourite 50 steam titles is a bit tedious... in other words... I'm lazy.

Perhaps protondb fits your needs?

https://www.protondb.com/

With steam+proton you can almost just buy whatever; but it does help to check the db before you pay.

For those who are not (always) on steam there's also the original wine:

https://appdb.winehq.org/

> With steam+proton you can almost just buy whatever

Unless you don't have a magically compatible hardware setup. On my laptop like half my Steam library won't start, only shows a black screen or crashes instantly. Not even all official Linux releases reliably work. The last time I tried Ubuntu I couldn't even install Steam out of the box. Yes, Steam+Proton has improved the situation immensely. It's still a different kind of experience than on Windows, though.

I just went the console route. Not perfect, but I like that it basically guarantees the hardware will be compatible with new games for 5+ years. The slightly better visuals aren't worth it to me, most games look good enough nowadays (or rather, the best-looking games tend to not be the most enjoyable ones on average).

Hilariously, NixOS actually gets steam set up perfectly every time, all the time.

Of course this presupposes you got NixOS set up at all in the first place. And I'm not ENTIRELY sure I'd recommend it for your daily driver. But a friend of mine talked me into it all; and despite the warts at times it just seems like it's the least worst distro (to praise it with faint damns)

There are some massive, incredibly fiddly consequences of using NixOS to run Steam games via Proton. A lot of stuff works, a lot of other stuff is a royal pain the ass.

I moved to flatpak for Steam on NixOS and couldn't be happier, except now the latest proton uses flatpak under the hood and flatpak doesn't support nested containers.

I hear the flatpak-based Proton works much better (and that makes sense) but I still have some titles that are broken with it but work with older versions.

Yep. ProtonDB and WINEHQ mentioned in other replies here are both excellent sites for that sort of information. For native Linux games, sites like Steam, and Itch.io both have little icons (often a little "Tux" the penguin, tho on Steam it's the SteamOS icon) you can look for which labels those games as bein' natively Linux. Obviously any game or program you install directly from your Linux distribution's package manager (app store, basically) will be native to Linux.

For non-game software (and even some games), https://alternativeto.net/ can help you easily find Linux-native alternatives to software that you know the name of from other platforms. Also great for finding interesting software alternatives for your other platforms (iOS, Androin, Win, Mac, etc) too.

Tracking "Linux" compatibility is difficult because there's no standard "Linux", just a bunch of separate hodgepodges that become incompatible with themselves after 2 years. It's been a problem with distributing software on Linux since the beginning.

Linux gaming is fantastic. I couldn't play dragon age origins on my windows 10 PC. Was a nightmare just to get it to launch and then it would just crash all the time. Tried it on my Linux machine and bam it worked no sweat. I should add the hardware was different so I can't rule out the game not working on rtx20 series or 9-10 gen i7. Couldn't believe it. (I also got it running on windows 7 before I decided to try my mint is).

Also many developers are creating native Linux versions - Paradox Games Studio comes to mind where their Grand Strategy games are available native on Linux. Rimworld and Factorio as well.

Nowadays I'm very unlikely to buy a game that doesn't have a native Linux version.

Interesting - is performance comparable to Windows or is there a significant hit?

It depends on the game, but of the ones I've tried so far, most are fairly comparable!

Separately; GOG.com has a large selection of games that run Linux native; though not necessarily the most popular ones.

It also depends on your kernel, the FUTEX_WAIT_MULTIPLE patch solves a specific Wine/Proton bottleneck that native software doesn't care about¹, but delivers a significant performance improvement if compiled in.

¹: https://lwn.net/Articles/811696/

I'm not much of a gamer these days, but aren't consoles pretty good these days? I guess it depends on what kind of games you like, but afaik the difference in available content for PC vs console is a lot smaller than it used to be.

Smaller, yes, relatively speaking. But in absolute terms, the gap is still vast, and not exactly closing. (If anything, widening, as we keep getting more and more reliable emulators on PC that give access to hundreds of older console exclusive titles.)

Plus, individual consoles are still randomly cockblocked by exclusive contracts, so you'd need 3 consoles to get all possible content, vs. a multiple accounts on one machine for all the various PC game shops.

> all possible content

The path to happiness for me has been realizing that I don't have time to consume all possible content anyway, especially right now (cf. "Peak Content"). So I just pick one platform every few years and choose from the games available on the platform.

Over the years, I've gone from PC to PS2 to Wii to PC and right now, I'm gaming on a Switch (plus Minecraft on the PC that I already have). And if there were ever a PS5 or XSX exclusive that I'm interested in, I can always watch a let's-play first and see if I'm still interested later. (Which has not even happened to me so far because I don't actively seek out news for games that are not on the platform I own.)

You won't get all content on PC though because not every game gets ported there.

I think a lot of people are pretty happy with a PC + Switch combo, since there's straight up no hope of Nintendo porting their games to PC in any time soon. And a Switch is relatively inexpensive (especially if you go for the Lite model)

Sony also has a lot of exclusives on their systems (Bloodborne, Spider-Man, Uncharted, Last of Us, God of War, etc)

Consoles aren't any better than Windows in terms of control.

They are fully controlled by the respective manufacturer, and if you're not getting permission dialogues, it's because you agreed to them when you first started the console. (Disclosure: I don't actually know if modern consoles spam permission dialogues or ads.)

Sure, but you don't need to trust a dedicated gaming machine as much because you only use it for entertainment.

I no longer evangelize for Linux.

The hardware support is good enough that it just works, and has been for a decade. In that period I've seen the desktop become worse and worse in the name of 'accessibility'. Since I can't get the people in RedHat to stop making the desktop worse my next best alternative is to make Linux toxic enough that there is no financial incentive for them to continue and simply leave.

Anyone non-technical who ask about windows alternatives I merely tell them that Linux is too hard and they should stick to Windows. Gate keeping is a virtue that we need to practice more of.

What accessibility? It has never had much support. Linux is terrible at that.

Is it possible to play SteamVR games on Linux?

With a Vive or Valve's Index, yes. The Occulus pricks dropped Linux support as soon as they delivered a consumer product.

Windows is literally just uber for malware at this point.