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.