I do not believe that _you_ are trolling with this question, but answering this is just asking to be trolled.

That said. Fortnite. Yes, I still play it with friends and cannot play it on Mac or Linux. :(

I'm sure others have similar examples. Also there are just simple things like playing with friends and streaming on Discord. Anybody streaming from Windows always comes across smooth and HD to the other participants while anybody on Linux seems to consistently be received (I don't know where exactly in the chain the problem exists, so just "received", as it may not be a broadcasting or encoding problem, I'm not an expert in this) with a lot of artifacts and lower framerates.

A friend of mine, a Linux user, says he installed Windows for gaming. Apparently the main issue isn't actual compatibility for games, but that a lot of games require some kind of kernel level anticheat (rootkit?).

It’s a few games, but a few very important ones.

GTAVs online ecosystem with custom servers. Rust hasn’t enabled Linux Battleye support. Valorant

Some releases that are temporarily popular like BF6, playtest of Battleye games where Linux support isn’t enabled (Fellowship, Exoborne). All games in this paragraph also by Swedish developers. Kom igen, linuxstöd

Yes, this is broadly true. Just about everything that does not have Linux-disabling anticheat runs wonderfully on Linux these days. You can check https://protondb.com/ to see how any given game runs.

Some intrusive ones (EA's anti cheat for recent Battlefields, Activision's anti cheat for Call of Duty, anything from Riot to name a few) do not work.

However, EAC - who is a major player in this field producing generic solutions - does support Linux. The involved publisher, however, needs to approve this and the developer need to turn on a feature flag. That's it.

However, some publishers simply deny this for... totally mental reasons ...and this means that the game is marked as borked in protondb even though the game could as easily be played on Linux thanks to EAC's Linux support.

"EAC supports Linux, but devs just won't turn it on" is the clickbait answer, but the details are more nuanced. EAC has multiple security levels that a title can set based on the threat model of the game, and most games with heavy MTX that use EAC shy away from it, largely because Fortnite doesn't do it. EAC is owned by Epic, and if Tim Sweeney says that you can't do MTX on Linux safely, then any AAA live services game with in-game MTX is going to shy away from it, regardless of how true the statement actually is.

"MTX" as in, microtransactions?

What do microtransactions have to do with anticheat?

granting clientside without paying, things like that

You don't want someone having a skin that you are charging money for among other things.

The Finals has mtx, is protected by EAC, and is playable on Steam Deck.

Throne and Liberty, which is also protected by EAC and has mtx, is also playable on Steam Deck.

So this is bullshit and it clearly shows it's the publisher's choice. What Sweeney thinks has nothing to do with it.

no it shows those guys are willing to take the risk and learn the water is fine.

most aren't

> What Sweeney thinks has nothing to do with it.

I don't know if this is a fever dream or if it actually happened, but I seem to recall reading something about Tim Sweeney using Linux for a week to see how it compared. If he liked it, Epic Megagames would publish titles w/Linux support. He ended up complaining about some irrelevant things in KDevelop and it was pretty clear what his intentions were before even trying things.

I can't find any reference to this online, but I'm pretty sure that it happened. This would have been ~1998.

edit: It may have been Mark Rein?

You are only safe if you run Tim's rootkit :)

This. While EAC does support Linux it is nowhere near the level of protection of EAC on Windows.

Yep anticheats are one of the big hurdles to 'porting' a lot of online focused shooters to linux. It's an unfortunate situation but I get it from the company's perspective, not having any anticheat leads to shitty situations for way more players than not having a linux version of their anticheat and a vast majority of players have Windows devices or are willing to dual boot.

Yes. Valorant and Battlefield 6, for example.

Escape from Tarkov is the only reason I have a Windows Hard drive still. It doesn't have anything else on it.

EFT has a pretty ridiculous history with attempts at anticheat. Several years ago they set up their servers to kick anyone with virtualization enabled because cheaters had been using VMs to intercept network traffic (the network traffic wasn't encrypted for tarkov then). The response from cheaters was to use a seperate bare metal build to intercept the traffic. The devs "fixed" it right before windows 11 came out with virtualization on by default.

FWIW, PvE and modded Tarkov does actually run fine on Linux (Streets map doesn't, nor does Arena).

It's definitely not the same, but between Arc Raiders and PvE I get my extraction shooter fix. Online Tarkov is mostly populated by Gaming Wizards™ anyways.

Yes I am playing Arc Raiders now instead of Tarkov because switching is not worth it. Until it will be!

This is true. Battlefield 6 is in this boat

Yes and they could just make it(the rootkits) work on linux. It's more about the publishers/devs actively opposing linux.

The major anti-cheats do support Linux, but it's opt-in on the dev side because they're significantly easier to bypass than the Windows versions. It's not even close, getting around the Linux ACs is child's play. It sucks but nobody really has a good solution yet.

Alternatively it's still a pretty small slice of the market that's not willing to dual boot for the major games that do require windows only anticheats so it's just not worth their dev and support time to try to serve that small slice. Valve's work on Steam Machines/Decks is the thing needed to actually push developers to supporting it by providing a relatively consistent target OS and a large enough install base to justify spending the money to support.

I dont think I'm getting trolled, I know that loads of games still dont work. I just wanted to get an idea of which games are the current biggest ones holding people back.

Battlefield, Call of Duty, Apex Legends, PUBG, Rainbow 6 Siege, Fortnite

Basically all the games I play regularly with my friends.

Fortnite & Call of Duty

If I could travel back in time and prevent my kids and nephews from ever learning about Fortnite, I might do it. Instead I'm out here trying to keep from getting sniped by a Simpson character.

Fortunately, it seems like the rest of the family is getting tired of COD's ceaseless churn, and might be willing to pick up something else.

Fortnite is a fun game though, it's the only game holding me back from fully switching to Linux. Cloud streaming just doesn't cut it, latency is way too high (+ more money for a single game)

Ah I had kinda forgotten Fortnite exists haha. I think I assumed your kids were younger.

Does Roblox run on Linux?

For me it's only games the specifically don't support Linux, which are mostly competitive multiplayer games with anti-cheat software. Apex Legends used to work great on Linux, but they removed support as an attempt to combat cheaters (there are still tons of cheaters).

For me the thing that pushed me to reinstall windows after I got a cheap $10 copy was Kerbal Space Program. Though, in my specific case I strongly suspect it was older hardware & driver issues than anything else, since I've not had any major problems on steam deck.

I do have more random crashes on certain games even on steam deck, but not as bad as Kerbal Space Program on my old (12 yr) desktop.

Factorio seems to work better on Linux. Which is both good and bad (since it's so addictive).

Factorio can save without stopping the game on Linux, which it can't do on Windows, since they just fork the process and do it in the fork IIRC, which makes the saving something you basically don't think about on Linux, but bugs you when ever auto save runs on Windows last I checked

Doesn't this make the game use double the memory for a while?

In addition to what others have said, a group of friends still plays enough League of Legends that I don't both dual booting. Also if you play RuneScape (RS3, not OSRS) the best 3rd party add-on, Alt1 Toolkit, only works on Windows.

Trying to get RDR2 to work on Linux, so far no luck.

I play it on Linux, try Proton hotfix.

I've played it on the Steamdeck without issue.

BF6 and any multiplayer EA games with anticheat

Apex is an EA game and actually ran great on Linux until they removed support. Unfortunate, but they said it was necessary to combat cheaters though that claim is somewhat dubious since cheaters is perfectly viable on Windows still.

FIFA is another one that comes to mind, or however they call it these days.

Also from EA

Its much easier to cheat on Linux though.

Battlefield 6, GTA V online, Escape From Tarkov, likely GTA VI

Imagine not supporting the latest releases that all your friends are playing.

Depends on your friend group; statistically speaking they're more like to play ARC raiders than EFT which does run on Linux

Steam Box 2 will be out before GTA VI

Zero of my friends are playing any of these games. GTA VI will probably do the console first release thing anyways.

Edit: Fair enough to the other ones though. This comment wasnt meant to be inflammatory or argumentative, but clearly someone else believed it was.

What's the point of arguing like this? You're asking for experiences from people, then when people give you proper answers it glides off with "well no one I know plays those anyways". Isn't the discussion larger than your personal and private experiences, if you're discussing in public like this?

You seemed to have some initial claim that "all games actually work perfectly fine, prove me wrong" but then you don't seem to actually want to engage faithfully anyways.

They think HN is Reddit, notorious with its flaming war

HN wasn't letting me comment, then I forgot about this. I wasnt trying to be hostile, I didnt think about the comment coming off that when when I wrote it. I feel you were far to quick to assume bad faith, but either way I apologize that my comment came off as argumentative.

I certainly never said nobody plays those games. I was just responding to their statement about not playing the games your friends are playing.

Microsoft Flight Simulator

From what I can see, that runs fine through Protob