Try installing Linux + steam on it. I think you'll find it's a better environment for gaming.

For _some_ games and hardware combinations it's great. Some games are still windows only, and for some games the performance on Linux is abysmal, even with Proton.

This is irrelevant for multiplayer gaming, where the anti-cheat software only runs on Windows because it needs to establish a security baseline for all players.

Easy anti cheat works in linux now.

Most games now just work

EAC has worked on Linux for like a decade. That doesn't mean that those games will let you play on Linux.

That's patently untrue. There were a few kernel patches necessary only a year ago to make certain EAC games work.

Here are all the games I play regularly with no problem:

League of Legends Counter-Strike Global Offensive Apex Legends VRChat Civilization VI Factorio RimWorld Path of Exile Skyrim Final Fantasy XIV

And my performance is usually better.

Most of these games don't do a great job at preventing cheaters; for years all Riot did to deter cheaters in League was threaten legal action against the cheat creators (In particular Joduska.me which was a scripting framework that enabled automated performing actions perfectly), Blizzard dealt with cheats by threatening legal action against WOW botters, CS:GO has Overwatch because Valve only mass-bans cheaters once every few years (and only when that cheat developer has amassed tens of thousands of customers and has open signups), and personal anecdotes from friends suggest that Apex cheating is somewhat still a problem. For VRChat, what would cheating even be for? Epilepsy / bypassing model age rating?

I don't really get why you keep playing the contrarian in this thread. Linux works for me for all the games I play. I get incredible performance. And the anti cheat stuff I don't really care about. I used to play CS 1.6 and there were cheaters sure but it didn't really change my ability to be a PC games enjoyer.

I'm not gonna read your comment and be like "omg he's right. my linux install sucks. back to winblows". I used to constantly wrestle with my Windows install and now I wrestle with my Linux install less.

I'm not playing the contrarian just to do so, I'm noting that there is a potential correlation between "allows linux users (AKA relaxed requirements / a lower baseline for cheating assurance)" and a higher percentage of cheaters in their game. At the start of both Valorant and Overwatch's lifetimes, it was effectively impossible to find a cheat in a PC match, and even now there isn't much evidence for there being widespread cheats available for <$100/month for these games.

You haven't actually offered any evidence of this being the case. It's just as easy to make cheats for games on Windows as it is on Linux. In fact most cheats are made for Windows precisely because most of the people buying these cheats are using Windows.

That's not what I said - my point is that companies with a relaxed security baseline (ie. not having a dedicated team of people tasked with investigating cheats and improving their anti-cheat system) tend to invite an increased number of cheaters into their games, and I back this up with real events.

- These companies will send cease-and-desist letters to cheat makers instead of working to detect their cheats (Joduska.me ceased operations due to a Riot C&D, and Bossland GmbH was actually sued and lost). If these cheats were instead detected and users banned on a continuous basis, no lawsuits would be needed.

- CS:GO implemented (as in, almost a decade ago) an "Overwatch" review system to allow players to review potential cheaters and have a consensus on whether or not cheating is likely. Valve is knows to be very relaxed on VAC - and knowing the company culture @ Valve being what it is, these ban waves probably only happen when one of the seniors @ Valve gets killed by a cheater in-game themselves and tasks someone with implementing some detection mechanism into VAC. Only recently (~4 years ago) has valve supposedly started to incorporate more advanced automatic detection and punishment systems[0], but at the time it wasn't doing anything about wallhacks and at auto-headshot cheats tend to be pretty good at adding enough noise to make it look very close to what professionals can do and thus these cases still end up in the overwatch queue (and note that this system probably hasn't been iterated on much; Valve doesn't do dedicated teams that own specific products).

Of course, there is no hard evidence for the actual number of cheaters in all of these games. But my point isn't that Linux is the vehicle or platform cheats are used on, just that a video game without a rigorous cheat detection system is more likely to open up their attack surface to other platforms. Valorant still has firepower behind it, so while there are cheats, Riot is invested in keeping it Windows-only to ensure they don't incidentally have to split their resources between detecting cheats and hardening their executables on Linux and Windows at the same time.

0: https://youtu.be/SnRgW54EWwA?t=299

>There were a few kernel patches necessary only a year ago to make certain EAC games work.

You are thinking of getting the Windows version of EAC working. EAC has had a wine version for a long time. EAC will detect if you are using wine and try and download the wine version.

Don't some big publishers of 'important' trendy multiplayer games with strong network effects still basically refuse to enable EAC's Linux support, though?

Do you know any recent articles or blog posts summarizing the state of affairs with competitive multiplayer games rn?

Check the proton database. Most games you're thinking of work just fine.

https://old.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/

GloriousEggroll is a Red Hat employee who works on the proton compatibility layer full time. He typically posts his progress on Twitter and will have world first screenshots of certain games working. His Twitter is a good resource.

Epic hasn't even enabled it for Fortnite, and UE5 definitely should enable fairly seamless Vulkan usage on other platforms (although the reasoning could be because the market is so small and Fortnite's QA team is already stretched incredibly thin)

Destiny 2? Bungie has been unpleasant about this, as I’m sure plenty of other devs still do-which, unlike the past where they could claim no market share, makes less sense now that Steam Deck is a thing and doing great.

Bungie is specifically and on-purpose making the game broken on Linux for no apparant reason. Other BattleEye titles work just fine. There's no technical reason why it doesn't work. All the technical work was done all the way in 2021.

https://store.steampowered.com/news/group/4145017/view/31046...

This is one of those cases where you need to vote with your money and stop supporting studios that are hostile to Linux. I actively avoid all Bungie titles for this reason.

As someone who has been on both sides, developing cheats and working in anticheat, AC on linux will always be significantly gimped compared to windows because of GPL related issues, anyone saying otherwise is doing it entirely for marketing reasons.

On windows a closed-source driver that can utilize and scan for anomalies in reverse engineered undocumented internal kernel structures is feasible. If you want to do something similar on linux you need to find a reverse engineer that has never laid eyes on linux kernel sources(good luck with that), have them reverse engineer and take very detailed notes on relevant kernel structures and functions, and then find a software developer that has also never laid eyes on kernel sources to write a driver according to those notes. Needless to say, this takes a fair amount of time and therefore money.

The alternatives are to implement your detections in usermode, where they can easily be fed false information from the kernel, or to publish the source code for your detections making them almost worthless.

Cheat developers have it much easier, they do not give a fuck about licensing and will just read kernel sources and ship a closed source driver, or ship a hypervisor that tampers with kernel data structures that they are able to just copy and paste out of the sources.

They really advertise to you inside the operating system?

I've been a Linux user for 20 years so I don't know.

Yeah they do. It started with Windows 10. It’s one of the reasons I moved over to Linux for gaming last year (I have been using Linux for work for years)

I asked chatgpt about this recently and it seemed adamant that windows advertised to you and it was ok as you could turn it off and it helped fund the development.

I assume windows is free nowadays? Back in the 98 days you used to have to buy it, or at least acquire it in questionable legal circumstances

Why do you share what an AI may have hallucinated?

The rising prevalence of comments like this is concerning, and I’m worried this indicates the existence of a large number people using AI this way that don’t warn us.

Windows isn't free, though upgrades have been for a while after major releases since 10. You pay for it with a new PC or you have to buy it for custom built PCs.

ChatGPT was trained on data from 2021 and earlier. It's not a good original source.

So the adverts don’t pay for windows development? Where does the money go?

Or are Microsoft double dipping?

I recently deleted my Windows partition, but I recall how after an update it blocked me from login in until it could tell me I really should try out Office 365, informed me Edge is better for me than whatever browser I was using (Firefox) and asked me for a Microsoft account.

> I was very surprised to see advertising in the operating system, for an operating system that people pay at least $190 CAD for.

Most people don't pay this - and I don't mean buying keys from lower-buying-power countries, I mean that anyone with a gaming laptop (which is a 2x bigger market than desktop[0]) is really only paying maybe $50 for Windows since Dell/Alienware, Acer, etc get very large volume licensing discounts.

0: "In 2021, gaming notebooks are forecast to account for nearly 43 percent of shipments in the global gaming PC market, with gaming desktops making up 27 percent of shipments. In 2025, the shipment share of gaming notebooks is expected to grow to 46 percent globally." https://www.statista.com/statistics/1119850/gaming-pc-market...

> Most people don't pay this

This is true. However, I have to say I still dislike the (kind of) double charging of selling the OS as a product and using it for advertising. The position Microsoft has allows them to both sell the cow and have the milk but that doesn't make it seem like a fair deal.

Discounts for Windows licenses to OEMs have been a thing for decades (maybe always?), yet Windows was still seen as one of Microsoft's crown jewels and an important business, and Microsoft didn't exactly go bankrupt.

Filling a paid product with advertising and monetized data collection just seems like a cheap move, even if the product is sold at significantly less than the list price in most cases.

> they're uninterested in actually competing.

Microsoft has not had the need to compete on the merits of their software for very long, and this is really by design.

In the corporate world they sell to people who can't make informed choices and will never be held accountable for the choices they make.

In the home market they mange to get pre-installed on most hardware.