this post was submitted on 21 Apr 2025
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Linux Gaming
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Hah. Nope.
Man, I would look like much less of a hater if people didn't keep making demonstrably incorrect claims.
No, installing Nvidia drivers wasn't a one line affair for me last time I tried (which was just this year, btw), and even after I got things set up it was a toss-up whether features would work, work but perform horribly or not be available at all. That includes HDR, VRR, DLSS, DLSS transformer model, DLSS frame gen and Ray Reconstruction. On Windows some of the newer versions of those can be a hassle to set up in old games and necessitate forcing in dlls using third party applications, but at least official support works reliably.
Some distros do come with Nvidia drivers prepackaged and that's fine, but all the feature issues remain. If you want a gaming-first distro there still isn't semi-decent game mode support for SteamOS or Bazzite.
Intel GPU support is slightly better but a bit short of hassle-free. You probably don't have an Intel GPU anyway, so we can let that one pass.
HDR support in applications is still sub par. That includes gaming and is true regardless of GPU brand, as far as I can tell.
Anticheat support is still poor and it still prevents many very popular games from running. At this point nobody has anything close to a solution to this, even conceptually. Yes, some anticheat providers have some degree of Linux support, but there is nothing close to kernel-level anticheat from Windows. Yes, this is a genuine problem.
Performance is... trading blows, I'd say. In some games you can get much better frame pacing and better overall performance. In others, particularly when using newer functionality it can go the exact opposite way. This is very situational. If you want cutting edge stuff and paid to get the hardware to run it, Linux is probably not for you. Salvaging weaker or aging hardware for older games is a better use case.
Gaming on Linux is much better than it was and it likely will keep getting better. That's good news in itself, getting hyperbolic just triggers flamewars and negativity on something that should be a pretty clean net positive. It really doesn't help.
I want gaming on Linux to be as good as it can be, but I too draw the line at kernel level anti-cheat. I'd rather deal with cheaters than install that crap.
Yeah, well, the answer to that conundrum is called a PS5.
If "as good as it can be" means competitive games are full of cheats then "good as can be" isn't good enough. Back when Windows wasn't good enough in this way PC gaming was a smaller slice of the pie overall.
Games having access to everything i do on my pc is sheer lunacy. Let the devs sanitize their fucking inputs and not give client information the player shouldn't have access to. Anti cheat has always been an arms race, nothing, and that does include your kernel anti cheat, will ever completely stop cheaters.
"Completely" is not the goal. Consoles aren't "completely" cheat free, either.
The goal is to make cheating hard enough that the average twelve year old can't easily do it or conspicuous enough that you can ban them when they do.
Because at that point most players will go from encountering multiple cheaters per game to encountering a cheater every many games, so the game looks like a mostly fair thing with a few outliers as opposed to an absolutely unplayable mess.
And since cheaters and hackers tend to flock to whatever is popular, particularly if they're monetizing their cheating in some form, the more popular the game the more of an interest they have in a secure-enough environment.
If you can't get that on PC they will focus on consoles. If you can't get that on Linux they will focus on Windows.
Well, hey, if there is an easy way that is just as secure and is hardware and OS agnostic I thoroughly recommend you go ahead and develop it. I hear there's good money in it.
Or is your proposed scenario that every single vendor of anticheat software working today is not only deliberately avoiding the use of equally good non-kernel level Windows anticheat but also deploying deliberately inferior, less secure Linux anticheat when they could deliver a solution just as good as the Windows alternative? How do you think that works?
Yeah, so the problem with that is you're typically not building a security platform with a game on top, you're building a game. The scope of the issue is not the same for Fortnite or LoL than for... I don't know, Fatal Fury City of the Wolves, if we're getting topical.
Especially in a multiplatform game where the PC is not your primary target and your targeted consoles have a semblance of platform integrity it is not unreasonable to expect the platform to handle at least the basics. And hey, if Windows gives you that through a third party service that's resources you can put in... you know, the game part of the game.
That's not being lazy, that's the second law of thermodynamics. Resources are limited, from developer time to server time (which goes up if you can't offload literally anything to the client).
You're more likely to have me meet you in the middle if we agree that there probably should be a middle ground where the layer of security that is now being offloaded to a third party service having kernel-level access should instead be handled by the OS. I don't know if that's better or worse, but it certainly isn't as weird and scary as having a bunch of mid-sized vendors have crazy access to people's computers just so they can play games semi-functionally. But to bring this back to the original argument, that sounds like something you're at best going to get from Microsoft. Linux being what it is, that isn't an option and is not going to become one.
I want gaming on Linux to be as good as it can be, but I too draw the line at kernel level anti-cheat. I'd rather deal with cheaters than install that crap.
Yeah at this point I'm tempted to swap back to Windows until I can ditch my Nvidia graphics card. Driver support is such a pain in the ass, it is absolutely not a single line. Getting games to run often includes installation of i386 drivers as well as vulkanlibs, because all the "easy" installations of Nvidia drivers only grab the 64 bit ones, and that's before even starting to get into all the tweaks and fixes you'll need to add for some games.