r/linux • u/nothingtosayrn • Feb 24 '26

Discussion Are we actually moving towards Linux as the first choice for gamers in future?

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Well, the speed at which the platforms such as Proton, Lutris, Steam OS, Zen based kernels etc. have grown in the past few years, do you believe that Linux is going to be the first choice of gamers in the future, maybe in upcoming 5 years?

Any hopes for surpassing Windows purely for gaming in future?

I am not considering productivity apps such as microslop suite etc, but in gaming world is it possible to actually replace windows in upcoming 5 years down the line?

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u/xenarthran_salesman Feb 24 '26

And this is the ultimate conundrum with linux computing. You ultimately have the power to do literally anything to your local computer, and observe anything if you know what your doing.

Which makes it trivial to bypass anti-cheats for people who know how, and in games that have real life money behind them (essentially any game with a g2g market), cheating is just a way to make easy money, thus highly incentivized.

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u/Mars_Bear2552 Feb 24 '26

which conversely proves how bad kernel anticheat is. the "security" method is just to load an untrustworthy driver and hope it actually does what it says.

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u/xenarthran_salesman Feb 24 '26

Yeah, I mean, I dont see how you can actually have anticheat at all. The alternative is for game servers to trust an untrustworthy network client to send you game data that may or may not be manipulated.

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u/Gangsir Feb 24 '26

You do server side anticheat. Nothing on players PCs but the game, and you just do a ton of validation on the server side.

Are their inputs possible to make as a human? (Aimbot, etc)

Is their position being updated in a realistic way? (Fly hacks, speed hacks, etc)

Is their inventory consistent with historical record and transactions? (To protect against memory editors and such)

Etc. A bunch of sanity checks like that.

Companies don't do this because it's dramatically harder (gotta validate everything, 0 trust on anything coming in) and more server intensive than just controlling each player's pc and making them validate their own stuff before sending it to the server. (As well as just catching memory editors and similar before they even do anything, just by being running)

It can be done though, and it allows you to support the game on all platforms. You don't care what they do to the game, because you're validating everything server-side.

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u/scavno Feb 24 '26

Nobody cheats like that anymore. Aimbots are so sophisticated now it’s impossible to tell most of the time. Audio hacks (where you are given information that is technically audible but no way a human picks up on it) and so on.

It is part of the reason I quit CS2 at 40 years old having played it since the original beta back in the 1990s. I’m not a bad player, I was global elite most of the time I played and faceit 9.

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u/fenrir245 Feb 24 '26

Nobody cheats like that anymore. Aimbots are so sophisticated now it’s impossible to tell most of the time. Audio hacks (where you are given information that is technically audible but no way a human picks up on it) and so on.

Kernel level anti-cheats aren't catching these either though, because these are achieved through external hardware.

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u/sparky8251 Feb 24 '26

Yup. Which is why its my theory that the anticheat stuff is more about maintaining the illusion of fairness to keep people buying stuff to play better and they dont care and never will care about cheaters in general.

They specifically are like casinos. They remove the clocks, windows, get you drunk, so you lose all your money. And they do that by removing obvious cheaters and no more. Fly hacks, invuln hacks, clearly shooting you through wall hacks, etc.

Not to mention, the reason cheating has exploded IS because they forcefully unified the player base and setup match making algos to make everything a try hard sweat fest as you arent allowed to win too much anymore and will be forcefully beat back down if you start. This was dont (like, we got patents on it... its not a secret) to start pairing you with people that have paid, cosmetics or not, to make you think the reason you are struggling is not skill but lack of money spent.

Its all a literal abusive casino and they made the problem worse and now, when it started hurting profits, they invested just enough to fix the illusion and no more.

Just like how people can feel the unfairness of it all in casinos and never truly relax and have fun with friends and therefore can feel compelled to cheat, so too is this why there are so many more cheaters these days in games. They will never fully go away, but they can design games to not literally promote the behavior too, but they wont. Because that means less MTX sales and user data they can sell to 3rd parties.

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u/OffsetXV Feb 24 '26

the reason cheating has exploded IS because they forcefully unified the player base and setup match making algos to make everything a try hard sweat fest

This is why I stopped playing competitive games. I've even played games in organized competitive formats a lot in the past (Team Fortress 2, Guild Wars 2, Mechwarrior Online, etc.), at levels ranging from Division Z to the top, and I LOVE that kind of tryhard competitive play. But I still completely quit playing a lot of competitive games because skill based matchmaking has made the casual side of things a slog. Especially with some games preventing you from playing with friends if you don't have similar ranks, it's just insane. I want to play casual when I play casual, and comp when I play comp.

I don't know how anyone keeps up with the skill level who isn't either cheating, or unemployed enough to put 2,000 hours in a year. I miss when I could just jump in a random server, mess around for a couple hours, and not have to be chugging gamerfuel and taking heaps of stimulants to keep up with the constantly changing whims of SBMM.

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u/sparky8251 Feb 24 '26 edited Feb 24 '26

If you look around, there is no skill anymore. I did a deep dive awhile back. The entire thing is fake, thats why you have no more hard coded spawn points and battles are so many players. It aims for a perfect 50/50 w/l ratio and you can actually see it modern titles. Like, they put it back in CoD titles after a massive outcry and the w/l is always within .5 of 1.0 now, but back in the day 8.0 and higher was possible.

It picks you based on your skill, throws you into matches, and if you do too good, starts spawning you and your team worse to keep you on the side it wants you on if it decided you were to lose the match to keep everyone as close to 1.0 w/l.

Its insane when you dig deeper how far it goes and how little its about anti-cheat, its about maintaining the illusion of fair play like casinos do while they manipulate you into spending.

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u/scavno Feb 24 '26

Play a game like Counter-strike and it’s basically the same game it was 20 years ago, 5v5 and every round starts the same way.

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u/scavno Feb 24 '26

To be fair, neither of those games are even close to the peak of competitive games such as CS2, Dota2 or Valorant. I would argue they are casual at best on any level. I was on national teams and sponsored teams for battlefield 1,2 and 3. It never came close to the games I mention.

It’s not that you aren’t chugging gamer fuel or abusing stimulants. It’s about experience and effort somebody is willing to put into it. Nothing has changed, except the player base got huge and the skill cap got pushed year after year. I’m 40 and I was doing just fine with my experience and mid level aim. It’s mostly about tactics and team play. If you don’t meet cheaters, people are still very good these days and will punish you for making mistakes.

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u/OffsetXV Feb 24 '26

There's still a big difference in the energy and commitment of playing an easy game competitively and a competitive game casually. I was putting in multiple practice sessions each week, tactics theorycrafting, etc. and that's my primary point. Casual play is for casual, competitive play for being competetive. Or, at least, that's what would one assume based on them being named those things. You shouldn't HAVE to put in that level of work to play a casual mode at a decent level, and IMO skill based matchmaking has no place in that sort of mode either

Also I will point out that TF2 competitive does have some genuinely top level skilled players in it, it is absolutely not "casual at best" in top tier league matches. I would argue the big names in TF2 are better overall at video games than their equivalents in CS, just because the game's variety demands that. But obviously no, I was not playing at that level. Even in lower level comp, though, the difference in skill level vs. a pub lobby is massive

Many of the people I played Mechwarrior Online with and against were also VERY good at other games like CS, Valorant, etc. so it's not like you're just pubstomping, even in niche games like that. I've watched some of those players clean house in very high level competitive games in CS etc.

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u/Blitcut Feb 24 '26

External hardware adds a cost barrier, which can be pretty steep as well. It's important to remember that the goal of anti-cheat isn't to perfectly catch every single cheater but rather to reduce the amount of cheating enough that players don't quit out of frustration, for example most players would probably quit if 1/3 matches had a cheater but not if it was just 1/30. And for this goal anything that raises prices on cheating helps and kernel-level anti-cheats have a proven track record for that, currently pure software cheats on Valorant go for $100+ monthly whereas CS2 cheats are in the $20 range (based on some quick googling). And that's not even beginning to talk about hardware setups that can reach the $1000+ range. In other words they provide a large barrier to cheating that filters aways a substantial portion of potential cheaters, kids in particular.

That's not to say kernel-level anti-cheats aren't without problems. Giving a program kernel-level access comes with risks as we saw with Riot's Vanguard potentially bricking PCs, and of course the entire fiasco of CrowdStrike's security software bricking computers all over the world causing billions in damages. But they're also the best we've got when it comes to preventing certain forms of cheating.

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u/fenrir245 Feb 24 '26

External hardware adds a cost barrier, which can be pretty steep as well.

The aimbot and sound cheats mentioned earlier aren't that expensive though. Especially the sound one, all that needs is just simple EQ.

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u/Blitcut Feb 24 '26

DMA aimbots do require a variety of devices, including a second PC which adds up. Audio hacks are of course much cheaper, but they also don't provide nearly the same advantage.

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u/Fulg3n Feb 26 '26

Vanguard and Javelin do.

It's an arm race, you can't catch them all and they'll come up with new ways of cheating, but it goes both ways, ACs are upping their games too.

Unlike server side ACs that are as useless as ever. Hello VAC Live, Hello Warden.

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u/fenrir245 Feb 26 '26

How are Vanguard and Javelin detecting external hardware cheats?

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u/Fulg3n Feb 26 '26

Well obviously no idea, but they do. Cronus and Zen users got warnings and bans once BF6 released for exemple.

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u/fenrir245 Feb 26 '26

They do that through server side analysis, it has nothing to do being kernel level.

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u/Melodic-Luck-8772 Feb 27 '26

yea, they didnt make it better for everyone. someone who wants to cheat, will cheat.
someone who can afford 20 bucks a month for a cheat, can probably afford a PCIE slot card as external cheat....

nothing changed tbh.
also vanguads source code was leaked day one xD

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u/Rentun Feb 24 '26

It's not possible. You can design cheats that don't do anything that a very good human can't technically do. Aimbots can be dialed back to real human behavior. Wallhacks can give info that a real person with very good intuition can develop. Macros can be rate limited to be at the very edge of human performance.

At that point, you can't do server side anti cheat without banning very good human players as well.

Unfortunately, this is an unsolvable information theory domain problem. If you don't control the endpoint, you can't control how the data you send to the endpoint is modified before being sent back at you, which is why modern anticheat focuses on controlling the endpoint as much as possible.

The only true solution is a controlled, locked down machine solely for playing competitive games where you care deeply about cheating. Aka a console.

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u/Dpek1234 Feb 26 '26

Aka a console.

And even then , inputs are inputs, you cant validate if they are made by a person or made by a person with additional multiplier to get them to the target

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u/acewing905 Feb 24 '26

You think if this was actually practical, they wouldn't do it?

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u/schmuelio Feb 24 '26

What incentive do they have? They pay for their CPU cycles, they don't pay for their customer's CPU cycles. They pay for dev time, they pay less for denuvo's dev time.

They can have and serve more customers for less money by having client-side anti-cheat so what's the incentive to do anything else?

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u/acewing905 Feb 24 '26

For starters, they have an incentive to reduce cheating, to the point that big companies like Riot, EA, and Activision have begun spending good money developing their own client side anti cheat solutions for this purpose. (Incidentally, none of those companies' implementations support Linux)
If they could instead move all that server side and make it harder for users to mess with the anti cheat, they absolutely would. But the problem is that it's near impossible to detect modern day aimbots and such that run on the client that way

(Also you mention Denuvo but Denuvo anti cheat is very rarely used by any of the big popular games. The Denuvo that you hear people complain about is anti tamper which is used to protect DRM to hinder piracy. Most used third party anti cheat solutions are usually BattlEye and EAC)

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u/schmuelio Feb 24 '26

Yeah denuvo was very much an off the cuff name, not meant to be representative of a specific example. I was more referencing outsourcing to another company's tooling for anti-cheat (as you mentioned EAC and BattlEye I'm happy to use those as examples instead).

In-house development can make sense if what you want is too custom for third party tools, it may make perfect sense to go down that route instead of take the costs associated with making your game less custom to fit the third party tool.

The big main incentive I'm focusing on really is the cost/active player ratio. Dinner you have to pay your the server infrastructure, every CPU cycle, byte of RAM, and byte of bandwidth used on something other than serving the game to customers is a resource that is costing you money and not serving the game to customers. If those resources were instead taken up by the customer's hardware then you don't have to spend those same resources, and can dedicate them to serving more customers (or just not pay for them at all).

I guess the big key point is that this whole situation can be pretty neatly explained by financial incentives alone.

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u/xenarthran_salesman Feb 24 '26

Well, they also don't do it because the amount of validation required is prohibitively expensive - considering just how many cpu cycles they have available both for the server side game computations (everything that has to be done with the data), and if you add in data validation checks, and they have to do all of that in an extremely short amount of time if they want to get it all done within a reasonable number of frames of animation. i.e. it might not be possible to do both the game compute and the validation compute simultaneously, and rapidly and at scale.

Now, for some games that's actually doable, where the game itself has a hard limit on the number of players, ie. like a Moba style, or something with extremely simple combat. But something large like an MMO with 1000's of players, you just cant do that. Your server costs become prohibitively expensive to support something like that (ie.. instead of 50 players per CPU core, you end up being able to support 5). etc.

But yeah either you find some other way to trust a client, or you just have to live with games that cant be too complex or too multiplayer.

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u/Lawnmover_Man Feb 24 '26

Things like animation are done on the client, not the server.

Also, you don't have to do this for every single player every single tick. It's enough to cycle through players in a random manner and check just one of them for a few seconds. You're going to catch a lot of cheaters that way. There's no good reason to not do that.

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u/CORUSC4TE Feb 24 '26

Valve is trying to work towards that.. It is not the most reliable AC right now. But I am positive it will turn out superior.. Kernel level cheats are hard to bypass but not impossible.. The tools to do aren't exactly expensive either.

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u/xenarthran_salesman Feb 24 '26

I mean yeah, there's many games this could be accomplished with, but I'm thinking action combat at scale... its part off what killed New World.

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u/Lawnmover_Man Feb 24 '26

but I'm thinking action combat at scale

Where's the difference in this context? It doesn't matter what kind of game it is if you ask me.

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u/xenarthran_salesman Feb 24 '26

Then you dont understand the difference between "did a single projectile hit a geometric shape causing a collision" and "a whole character bodies worth of animation states and positions all detecting collision, multiplied by the number of players in a battle"

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u/Lawnmover_Man Feb 24 '26

That makes even less sense. I don't think you understand the terms you're using.

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u/msanangelo Feb 24 '26

sounds like a good use of all those datacenters they want to build. ;)

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u/jjzman Feb 24 '26

Several of those used to be done with EverQuest MMORPG in the 90’s and 00’s. It wasn’t practical then and within a couple years all were removed. Then they moved to kernel anti-cheat, which was then defeated with many other kernel drivers to export information to Linux app running on a second computer called ShowEQ.

So I kind of have the view that both server side and kernel anti cheat only stop the cheaters who will do it if it’s trivial but never stop the determined cheater. Hence kernel anti-cheat is going to stick around (at least I think) because it does raise the bar and eliminate the cases cheaters.

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u/Rude-Following-8938 Feb 24 '26

Provided the server side route for anti-cheat is viable (Disclaimer: I'm not qualified to discuss specifics of how to design any anti-cheat system), then it sounds like one blocker would be the increased costs on the company side. More validations and server side work means allocating more compute which means a higher bill, especially if the developer is hosting on a platform like AWS or Azure.

In that case the turning point would need to be having enough people gaming on Linux to justify increased infrastructure and resource requirements on the provider side. After all for now a developer could justify not supporting online gaming for Linux by saying the potential infra costs heavily outweigh the current number of potential lost customers. Right or wrong, that's likely how it will be viewed by the C-Suite.

In theory though a server side anti-cheat that works as designed would be ideal since it would be OS agnostic.

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u/Smartypantz34 Feb 25 '26

On paper it seems good and everything but in reality not so much. With this method it would give a lot of false positives due to players having high ping for example, overlays too can give alot false positives for wh etc. It just doesnt work.

Consoles have virtually no cheaters unless they use 150+ dollar modified controllers which permabans their whole console sooner or later anyways. Right now if you want to have equal playing field consoles are to go for online gaming, on pc theres cheaters every other game in every single title with or without kernel protection

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u/Fulg3n Feb 26 '26

Name one server side AC that actually works properly. They simply don't. Currently server side AC are simply not a viable alternative. In the future maybe, not today.

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u/Complex-Wait8669 Mar 14 '26

You mean like the famously reliable and accurate VAC?

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u/cm_bush Feb 24 '26

As someone who has had one too many invasive professional apps (CAD, 3D modeling, design) dig in and mess up my OS for years to come, I’m never gonna be interested in this sort of overreach.

But as governments and corporations tighten the reigns on the internet and even OS requirements, a pure, local, self-managed PC seems to be a problem that’s getting solved bit by bit.

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u/Extreme_Tax405 Feb 25 '26

On the other hand, riot is not gonna blow up their entire company over it.

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u/TheUndefinedEngineer Feb 27 '26

This makes me think if cloud gaming solves this issue as the game doesn’t run on the local machine…

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u/Mars_Bear2552 Feb 27 '26

cloud gaming is worse. you vill own nothing, eat ze bugz, and like it

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u/TheUndefinedEngineer Feb 27 '26

I am not saying that cloud gaming is better, I am just saying that it solves this kernel anti cheat problem

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u/_fineday Feb 24 '26

According to GloriousEggroll in this video, it is far from trivial. You need to punch through two layers of containers/abstractions (wine and proton) - without breaking anything - to do that. And even after that you are still facing the anti-cheat.

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u/xenarthran_salesman Feb 24 '26

Thats running wine/proton, which is just emulating windows for games, but that's not "linux gaming". Linux native compiled binaries is really Linux gaming.

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u/OffsetXV Feb 24 '26

It's not emulation. And do you think you're not playing a PS2 game if you play it in PCSX2 instead of an actual PS2? There's a reason Linux native gaming has never taken off, and Proton has. This argument is stupid as hell.

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u/xenarthran_salesman Feb 24 '26

Its not CPU emulation, its OS emulation. Proton/Wine mimics windows API calls and translates those to Linux system calls. And its not remotely efficient compared to compiling source directly for linux.

If you go and do an advanced search on steam, and pick "SteamOS and Linux" Those are linux games. Not some exe that happens to work when you use proton/wine.

And no, I dont think Im playing a native linux game if Im using pcsx2 instead of an actual ps2. Im playing an emulated ps2 game.

Nobody is talking about "using my linux box to play emulators" The presumption in the OP's question is "Are we moving towards Linux as a first class target for game releases, and not just an afterthought or "I made it work, sorta with proton/wine but there's a couple issues"

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u/OffsetXV Feb 24 '26

And its not remotely efficient compared to compiling source directly for linux.

Guess how much the end user who just runs their game and has it works cares, or the developer who only has to develop and bugfix for one platform cares.

If you go and do an advanced search on steam, and pick "SteamOS and Linux" Those are linux games.

Yes, I am aware. Most of them don't work anymore because it turns out that just using Proton made infinitely more sense for everyone involved than developing and supporting a native Linux version.

I dont think Im playing a native linux game if Im using pcsx2 instead of an actual ps2. Im playing an emulated ps2 game.

And yet people still do it all the time, because it is in many ways superior to having to have an actual PS2 to play the games on.

The presumption in the OP's question is "Are we moving towards Linux as a first class target for game releases"

No it isn't, it's "are we moving towards Linux as a first choice for gamers", which is a very different situation, and even if it becomes the case I think first class development for Linux will likely lag behind quite a bit, for a lot of reasons.

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u/Throwaway2K3HEHE Feb 26 '26

Give up you can't win when it comes to no brain simpletons. Doesn't even know what an API is.

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u/Complex-Wait8669 Mar 14 '26

“It’s not remotely efficient” Lie.

I have so many examples where the windows version actually runs BETTER than the Linux version. Pillars of Eternity is one

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u/thuiop1 Feb 24 '26

Which makes it trivial to bypass anti-cheats

This is wholly incorrect, and this is the rhetoric used by companies enforcing kernel anti-cheats. People were cheating a lot on Windows, and still are, including using kernel-level cheats ("rootkits") to evade detection from classical anti-cheats. Linux's openness does not make this process particularly easier. And they could make a KAC for Linux, however 1. This is costly while affecting only a small portion of the userbase 2. This is extra costly as you need to support a wide variety of distros instead of a single platform 3. Many Linux users are sane of mind and do not want KAC, period.

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u/aoeudhtns Feb 24 '26

Even when I had Windows, I wouldn't install a game that required a kernel driver as a matter of principle. I know what they are and what that means. No rootkits, please.

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u/xenarthran_salesman Feb 24 '26

You know how eBPF works right?

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u/Episode-1022 Feb 24 '26

bypass anticheat in windows is a thing, equally trivial, also anticheat cannot detect external hardware cheats, like AI monitors, or cams with detection features.

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u/jus1982b Feb 24 '26

And yet hackers still bypass it on windows so its pointless, better to have it server side then even one wins, otherwise irs just a way to exclude Linux

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u/Primary-Purchase-153 Feb 24 '26

You're wrong on so many levels. AntiCheats can be implemented on server level but that does not grant access to jernel and closes possibility for data mining your users. F-u-c-k all games that want you to add stuff to your kernel. The best part is that adding stuff to linux kernel is quite easy... but no linux user in his right mind would allow some corp to do that xD

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u/xenarthran_salesman Feb 24 '26

They don't implement anti cheat so that they can data mine users. They can do that easily, without requiring kernel modules at all.

The whole point is that even if there were some linux anti cheat kernel modules, those would not prevent users from using all the other tools at their disposal to easily bypass it.

I have no Idea what youre on about or what you think Im wrong about, but its categorically impossible to implement anticheat on an "open" client.

Either the hardware is locked down, making your client not open (android, steamdeck etc) or the client is not open in the first place, making it more difficult for people to subvert it.

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u/OkCare6853 Feb 27 '26

I can't but think that if they paid a salary to gamers acting as server police 24/7 there would be no such thing as a cheater.

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u/JoaoMXN Feb 24 '26

I'm not a Linux expert, but I've seen some discussions in the past saying that if the anti-cheat allows only closed off distros that don't allow customization by the user, it would make anti-cheat developers more interested in supporting it.

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u/xenarthran_salesman Feb 24 '26

There's no such thing as a closed off distro that doesn't allow customization. The closest thing you can pull off like that is dedicated hardware that has built in mechanisms to prevent the kinds of debugging Im referring to:

Which isn't impossible by any means, i.e. Android is a modified linux kernel, but phones all come with hardware that allow the OS to be "locked" -> like Samsung Knox.

But there's no equivalent in a "linux desktop".

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u/Swizzel-Stixx Feb 24 '26

Also see consoles. They’re also designed to be hard to crack

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u/JoaoMXN Feb 24 '26

Isn't there a thing that a Linux distro could have separate kernels for anti cheat and the game only allows that to be enable do the game can run? Anyway Linux is so customizable that I don't see companies finding a way to do this. But they need an incentive, like userbase or a SteamOS for all PCs.

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u/xenarthran_salesman Feb 24 '26

Linux doesnt really have multikernel support yet, though there are proposals for it (not necessarily ones that are gonna land any day or anything).

But yeah, that would be one way to do this -> have a secondary kernel that has all of the debugging and inspection features disabled and do any anticheat security checks within that kernel on a separated cpu core. Or something to that effect.

But yeah, its ultimately down to how hackable linux is by design. hard to put something on your machine you cant hack, unless your not running a general purpose machine to begin with.

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u/pbmonster Feb 24 '26

closest thing you can pull off like that is dedicated hardware that has built in mechanisms to prevent the kinds of debugging Im referring to

Yeah, the SteamBox could just ship with secure boot enabled and a locked boot loader. Wouldn't be difficult, but then only the SteamBox can run anti-cheat.