PC Gaming

I'd trust Valve with the ability to only allow signed drivers way more than Microsoft. And also, Valve could make it so whatever thing they do to make SteamOS secure is optional and is only turned on if someone installs a game that requires kernel level anti-cheat, thus giving the user the ability to either choose to secure their OS to be able to play a game they like that has kernel anticheat, or not do so and keep using SteamOS (or whatever linux distro they choose assuming Valve allows this secure environment thing to be exported to all Linux distros) as is.

That's valid. I've played twitchy shooters since I was like 8, so it's pretty much what I'm most used to.

but why can’t server side cheat detection be the main focus?

Ideally, this would be the BEST way to prevent cheating, and it's the approach Valve has essentially. It's how they managed to absolutely obliterate every bot that was plaguing Team Fortress 2 for years and they haven't resurfaced since in a large enough group to matter, and any botnet that goes online quickly gets whacked. But the reason it's not focused on is because it costs a lot in terms of server overhead, and triple A gaming companies are more beholden to shareholders and cutting costs than any other company, so... They'd rather not spend that much on server stuff and offload the anti-cheat to the end user, which I find to be stupid. And also, a lot of companies have a vested interest on keeping cheaters playing or re-buying the game, like Tarkov, which is plagued with cheaters constantly despite having a stupid high barrier of entry, and my only theory is that there's so many russian hackers playing that if they banned them all they'd lose a decent enough chunk of the playerbase that it would threaten it.

It's really ironic that DRM on Netflix restricts Linux viewers to 480p. Why would anyone bother fighting with DRM when just pirating it gives you a 4K version that actually works?

I think that's what Valve might actually try to do with SteamOS, actually. They might require code to be signed by Valve to not be malicious, and I'd trust Valve with that type of power way more than Microsoft.

And while I do use Windows 11, I recently reinstalled it and the first thing I did was delete any and all AI stuff from it AND run scripts to prevent them from coming back.

I have tried the Windows version of Krita at one point but I did not like it that much.

Automated could work using AI to check how someone is playing, since a lot of LLMs are specialized in analyzing if something has human behaviors on it or not, but even then that approach isn't 100% guaranteed. Ideally we'd use server-side anti-cheat instead of offloading it to client side, but that costs money and suits are allergic to spending money.