this post was submitted on 13 Nov 2025
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Anti-cheat will still be one of the biggest problems for the new Steam Machine (www.gamingonlinux.com)
submitted 1 day ago by cm0002@suppo.fi to c/steam@programming.dev
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Kernel-level anti-cheat feels like it's everywhere now, and will remain a thorn in Valve's side for the new Steam Machine powered by SteamOS Linux.

On Linux, there's no kernel-level mode available for anti-cheats like they would use on Windows. I know plenty of readers, and gamers across the net probably see it as a benefit due to privacy concerns, and that's fine - but it doesn't change what a lot of people want to play that can't.

This is something many bigger games simply don't want to pull away from including the likes of Call of Duty, Vanguard from Riot, EA Javelin for Battlefield and so on. While we do have some anti-cheat vendors that support Linux like Easy Anti-Cheat and BattlEye (and a few others), it's user-mode with no kernel-level and many developers really don't like that.

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[–] kaidelorenzo@lemmy.today -1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I wonder if anyone at Valve is working on bringing trusted boot into mainstream Linux desktop usage. I'm pretty sure that's the core hurdle that keeps game developer's wary of the anti-cheat situation on Linux.

But it does open the can of worms of making it easy for apps/games to only work on specific Linux systems. We see that with how GrapheneOS has essentially the same verified boot functionality as "normal" Google Android but that doesn't actually mean any apps that want verified boot actual work on GrapheneOS.

Maybe if Valve creates a consortium of Steam verified boot certified distros. Then Valve could require that games that publish on Steam with verified boot requirements have to support any distro in the consortium. That seems like it would likely prevent the issue. The core issue being that you don't want to make it so easy for developers to prevent their game from running on certain devices that they just turn it on just because "why not?". The worry is losing games that might have supported Linux dropping support for all Linux except SteamOS.

We sort of have that now with secure boot in a way. Microsoft makes it so that other OS developers can boot on the vast majority of OEM Windows computers without disabling secure boot.

https://0pointer.net/blog/brave-new-trusted-boot-world.html

https://grapheneos.org/articles/attestation-compatibility-guide

https://docs.siderolabs.com/talos/v1.11/platform-specific-installations/bare-metal-platforms/secureboot#disk-encryption-with-tpm