265
Linux is now the best gaming system. ｜ fernvenue's Blog
blog.fernvenue.comWhen it comes to gaming on Linux, many many many people’s understanding stil remains in the Jurassic era. For the past few years, I’ve been using Linux as my main operating system for both work and gaming. From my personal experience, the gaming experience on Linux is far superior to that of macOS and Windows. I know I know…whenever I mention this, there are always some old-school individuals who come out to say that Linux’s driver configuration is complex, its game support is not rich enough, and its compatibility issues are significant, among other problems. In this article, I will directly address these issues and let everyone understand how much the gaming experience on Linux has developed by 2025.
It really depends on the game. For things that are fundamentally PvP with a bunch of players, sure. 1v1 games sometimes use a bunch of other solutions and if there are big PvE components things may get complicated.
And that’s why I said “maybe” up there and why I went with cloud gaming as the default. Rendering on client means you can still do all sorts of crap in terms of wallhacks, spoofing inputs and so on. I really wonder how safe even cloud gaming would be. Could you do effective autoaim with just a rendered frame fast enough? I bet somebody would try.
Hell, in some cases the cheating isn’t even on software these days. CS had a big argument about some keyboard behaviors recently, as did fighting games about leverless sticks enabling certain shortcuts. I genuinely don’t know the current state of affairs around those these days.
The solution for this that’s now in vogue is server-side occlusion checking. Basically, map what objects/characters that player has line-of-sight on server-side, and send the client only data for those which are visible.
This exists - it’s usually done with a microcontroller that intercepts the monitor feed, scans nearby the player’s cursor or center-of-screen for probable targets, and softly fuzzes mouse movements towards that target.
Yep, 100%. That’s why root-level AC is a bad option: cheaters are just switching over to these out-of-band techniques.
Companies prefer root-level AC because it gives non-technical stakeholders the impression that a game is “cheat-proof”, and therefore, that they don’t need to fund customer support to monitor and review reports of cheating. They’re not using root-level, client-side AC because it’s more effective than alternative options.
Not the case in my experience. Nobody is backing out from server-side checks and nobody is spending a ton of money either developing or purchasing anticheat to appease “non-technical stakeholders”, such as they are. Technical directors and technical leads exist. You won’t convince a random executive with a grumpy engineer in the room saying things are a waste of money. And that’s assuming your decisionmakers are “non-technical” in the first place. Plenty of studio heads came from engineering.
Game developers have metrics for cheating, they’re not making it up, and as far as I can tell you get better results on PC by doing both than just one. Worse, when you don’t have tight enough anticheat players can feel it, too, which is ultimately the only thing that matters.
As I was telling someone below, the goal of anticheat isn’t to fully secure the game. No game is fully secure. But it matters to make abuse onerous because it’s a very different experience to go from multiple cheaters a game to a cheater every multiple games. Trivial cheating that average players can access is a dealbreaker.
Riot Games is a perfect case study where this exact thing happened, IMO.
League of Legends had millions of MAU and a near zero incidence of cheating, for a ~13-14 year span. They implemented root-level AC for their next game, Valorant, and they ran into aimbot problems within weeks. Root-level AC was rolled out for League a few years later, despite vocal objections from their developers, several of whom were vocally against the move on r/leagueoflinux.
Overwatch is another example of a super-popular game that manages to stay cheater-free using only heuristics and player reports. They’re doing dramatically better at stamping out cheaters than Valorant, CoD, and other comparable games that include root-level AC.
Are there any counterexamples where you’ve seen a game struggling with cheaters fix the issue with root-level AC? I can’t think of any, but maybe my gaming pool is just too narrow.
Riot games is not a game. You’re saying LoL had “zero incidence of cheating”? That is… a bold claim. Ditto for Overwatch.
Your sample is both narrow and inaccurate.
According to Riot’s own stats, the number of detected cheaters in ranked matches doubled after they rolled out their root-level AC for League (1/400 matches -> 1/200 matches):
https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev/dev-removing-cheaters-from-lol/
https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/dev/dev-vanguard-x-lol-retrospective/
The article you cited does not support what you claim. League had a bot problem, not a cheating problem. The bots played against each other, and not against humans. This is because they were extraordinarily bad; they ran out of base and died, just to claim credit for having “played” games so the account could unlock new characters.
I spoke of Riot Games because I was comparing Leauge with their other game, Valorant.
Okay, that’s an actually useful response to maybe help bridge the gap between what each of us is saying.
You see cheating as only players using the game’s mechanics to gain an unfair competitive advantage over each other. I’m using it in the wider but perhaps more industry-standard way where it includes… well, basically any hostile usage that breaks the rules.
So yeah, farming and botting absolutely count from my perspective.
I do think maybe “security” is a better term to include both and “cheating” works better the way you’re using it, because I do see how the average user would primarily be concerned with visible cheating that is immediately annoying and feel that “hey, people paying bot farms to buy grind eventually hurt everybody” is more of a deflection from a monetization argument than a gameplay argument, particularly in a grindy free to play thing like LoL.
But maybe you can meet me in the middle there and acknolwedge that for the devs those are both security issues they want to plug. Especially if beyond somebody selling crap to their players instead of them and costing them revenue they also add to their backend costs on top of that. And extra especially if it’s wrecking some sort of in-game economy, leaderboards or infringing on legal regulations.
The Overwatch example, which you’ve conspicuously not mentioned, still works even with the added context, though.