The issue is that it creates incentives for others to cheat, and often then grief players. The overall vibe of the game goes off, and people leave.

No one has mentioned the thing they’re doing right here:

This led to a shift in hiring strategy. “We had focused almost entirely on software engineering, but we had no one who actually understood this data,” he recalled. “We completely pivoted our hiring toward data scientists, and today we spend far more effort analyzing data than reverse-engineering programs.”

A huge part of the argument from us Linux users has been: These companies say a bunch of stuff, but from the words it seems pretty clear that the maths is off. It would be nice if they actually shared some of the maths, but actually having someone who studied statistics on the payroll is at least some measure of trust.

Having said that, the inflated sense of importance of these companies thinking they deserve root is pretty astonishing:

Kernel-level anti-cheat operates at the innermost layer of the operating system, allowing it to inspect the entire PC. While this offers a broad detection scope, it presents significant privacy and security concerns for users. Introducing this topic as a “controversial slide,” van Dijck acknowledged, “It is invasive, and we agree.”

However, he argued that it is an unavoidable necessity at present: “Cheat software is already doing the exact same thing, reaching the point where cheaters boot via USB drives to hijack the system before the kernel even loads.” He also noted that while Microsoft is enhancing platform security, those measures do not apply to older Windows versions used by many players.

OK, but people who aren’t cheating aren’t doing that. They have banking information on their computers. The kernel code could be exfiltrating that in the normal telemetry (which makes servers a target), or be hacking your invasive kernel module (which is a honeypot). The fact that they’re not even considering that some other game’s anti-cheat could be used as a vector for cheats is, like I said, astonishing.

The cherry on top is the admission that this highly risky kernel module is vibe coded.

He also noted that AI coding assistants influenced their approach. “Thanks to tools like Claude and Codex, solutions that used to take years can now be built in a short time,” van Dijck explained. “The barrier to building custom solutions in-house has dropped significantly.”

Just use the data scientists bro.

Cheats today aren’t like the TF2 cheats some people imagine. The way modern cheats are described is “cannot distinguish from high level play”. To use a hardware cheat as an example, you have a mouse and capture card, and connect that to a raspberry pi, put some software on the pi, then make the pi imitate a USB mouse. Then, whenever aiming near a target, have the pi “lock on” to that target (the pi uses object detection to find targets). You can also make it more or less accurate to make it less detectable. In this example, it’s literally a mouse moving around. Doing something like confirming aim on the server side doesn’t help here.

To explain a (hardware) wallhack, you can plug in a USB-C device into the PC. Now USB-C devices can also use thunderbolt, which is just PCIe, which means it has DMA access to the PC’s RAM, no OS required (the OS needs to permit the device but after “trusting” the device, the device can do whatever it wants). So, you do a similar trick. Capture card + DMA access to the PC RAM. The Pi finds the place where the game tracks objects, finds targets, and places a box around them (so you see the game from the capture card with the box over all targets, including behind walls). Now you might be saying “well the server shouldn’t send targets behind walls”, but even if the server doesn’t do that, it needs to send them a little bit before they’d be visible, and that’s enough of an edge.

Kernel hacks are basically the same thing, but without the expense. You can see a target a fraction of a second before they’re visible, and the mouse can be told to move to the target. This is the same as high level play because people can often predict where someone is going to be, and are very, very good with tracking targets, so it just looks like a good player.

It’s a pretty tepid way of thinking about the issue to be honest. In a strategic sense, basically any move Microsoft is forced to make for actual (rather than apparent) security makes it harder for them to do things in a way which creates lock-in. Yes, they will use it to push for DRM, as another commenter noted, but that’s another apparent security solution. In the long term, this is a positive, but it’s not an immediate and direct benefit, as the blog post notes.

I have the kk3. Wins for not needing an app and also firmware upgrades via just a file upload to the controller as USB Mass storage.

The buttons are “classic” not micro switch. Some prefer the latter.

You may not have considered the Intel Arc GPUs. Basically they were bad on Windows and are slowly improving, but unsure about their state on Linux. The cards were quite bad at some point, and well worse than an experience with NVIdia, despite the libre stack.

I would say the “best” depends on goals here. I generally encourage use of AMD over NVidia, but the difference is quite small. If you’re already going with CachyOS, then you’re well beyond the skill level to be able to navigate the tiny additional complexity of an NVidia card. Just buy the best bang for buck and your use case.

As for Mali, recent kernels and Mesa versions have made significant inroads. I do believe we’ll get pretty good support for Mali by the time the Qualcomm ARM Laptops become available for Linux.

I don’t know if Linux Gaming would exist if it wasn’t for OpenGL and Carmack using it for Quake.

Unfortunately we are in the Glide era of VR. OpenXR exists, but someone needs to create a killer app which uses it.

I remember the frame time issue happening but it fixed itself and I can’t remember the cause. Try changing the refresh rate of your monitor, it might kick something which fixes it.

Performance should definitely be mostly on par with Windows.

This is the first I’ve heard of it. Fingers crossed he has a Linux video in the works.

In that case Steam flatpak isn’t really what you want. You probably want to use Bottles, which creates a flatpak-like sandbox. This is not a guarantee or anything, but does give you some protection (at least, better than running it on Windows I guess).

If you don’t use steam because it’s a shady source, I guess Bottles would be your go-to. I think parent is talking about if you bought a game off steam.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiCF1QdyxhM

Intel has had open source drivers for quite a while, they just get upstreamed slowly.

Fair point, but having not read the comics, I can hardly copy them unless I pirate the original comics now can I. The author would probably be on board with me doing that.

He has denied their denial.

i have a feeling this person is an Authoritarian. Like they believe that if we all stopped pirating then somehow they would get games for cheaper or for free. Like all the anger and the rage at the corporations is somehow turned back on the “pirates” who they are “subsidising”.

Sorry, yes that’s what I meant. The idea is to create accounts on private trackers, and one way to do this is to wait for open signups (which I used to use on Reddit, not sure what the Lemmy equivalent is). As you amass them, you can just input them straight into Prowlarr. Then, when looking for something; say, music in Lidarr, it will search all the private trackers and hunt for albums from that band (or movie, or TV show). Just set the seeding ratio on your Tracker to a high enough number to satisfy all the private trackers and Bob’s your uncle!

Yeah, setting up the Servarrs (Lidarr/Radarr/Sonarr + Prowlarr) along with your bt client, then trawling opensignups to get onto private torrent sites.

We need to block the adblock blockers…

Did you mean 2:1? 1:1 is basically leeching because the network cannot grow. 2:1 means you’re supporting growth therefore seeding.