This is not a SteamOS problem. It's a problem made up by the gaming industry so they don't have to invest into decent anti-cheat.
this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2025
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Fck games with client anticheat, especially those requesting root or kernel access. No thank you.
Shouldn't it be possible to analyse player behavior on the server with AI and ban based on that?
These games are such a small portion of the overall steam playerbase I'm not sure why Valve would care. Everyone makes such a big deal about like 4 or 5 games that dont run because the devs have explicitly chosen to not allow it.
From the article:
Other major titles, such as Call of Duty, Battlefield 6, Valorant, League of Legends, and Fortnite, also cannot be played on Linux. For many players, that immediately rules out Linux as a viable platform.
Like 3 of these 5 games mentioned are not even available on steam. Why is this on Valve to fix?
It's technically not Valve's problem in terms of responsibility, but Valve considers it a problem because their goal is functional Linux support for all games on Steam. They want to achieve that to fully decouple from any dependency on Windows whatsoever, and to have leverage in case Microsoft tries to shut them out on Win11 or a future Win12.
But yeah, still sucks that some studios refuse to support Linux on arbitrary principle.
Because these games have gigantic player bases.
These games are such a small portion of the overall steam playerbase
They are but they're also very popular, and people will avoid platforms where they're not supported.
Why is this on Valve to fix?
Because Valve is the one trying to sell people hardware that runs on Linux?
Because they want Linux to happen. Just like it's on them to fix Nvidia as well.
I don't want to run a dual boot for just iracing 🤷♂️
The issue isn't with Valve. It's with game developers that don't want to support Linux. If they wanted to, they could absolutely come up with an anti-cheat system that works with Linux. Personally, I'll never install anything on my machine that compromises my control over it.
What's worse is none of those anticheat systems prevent cheating, they are just about tracking.
Absolutely! But it would still be a big win for SteamOS - in terms of mainstream adoption, anyways - if popular games could be played on their OS.
Popular games can. Those ones can't.
🤷♀️ Like them or hate them, those games are pretty popular.
They are able detect kernel level cheating by looking for things like suspicious kernel drivers being loaded and are able to detect some forms of hardware level cheating, things like special pcie cards for DMA can be detected by kernel level anticheat, more sophisticated hardware level cheats cant be detected by kernel level anticheat. to be clear this does not mean that there is 0 risk of malicious intent and behavior done with the kernel level anticheat, and also the security implications of extra code inherently running in kernel mode when it doesnt need to still exist, but to say that they nothings is wrong, they at least in theory are able to detect more cheats than a userspace level one, now if they are actually using their kernel level priveledges to detect those cheats that, a traditional userspace anticheat wouldnt be able to, is a diferent question
From a purely technical standpoint: normal (unprivileged) anti-cheat can only look inside the process its running on, kernel anti-cheat has access to the entire OS, is this correct?
Are there cases of cheating which unprivileged anti-cheat absolutely cannot catch? Or is it that kernel anti-cheat is just so much easier to implement.
yes, kernel level cheats are a thing, but nowadays hardware level is getting common, plus with AI people have been making models who only use the video output which you can just get by splitting the signal and is completely undetectable and inject inputs directly at the hardware level with special periphals and runs in a separate computer, these AI cheats only provide aim assist and trigger assist, but are completely undetectable outside of Valve's style of server anticheat that actually analyses the inputs the clients send
Damn never thought of hardware level cheats but makes sense.
hardware-level anti-cheat when
cant do much outside of forcing physical presence on a monitored enviroment with trusted hardware, even with consoles, what stops people from modding controllers and analyze the raw video feed from the hdmi? nothing really, it just more hassle, people will simply develop tools to make the hassle smaller