To all #Gamers out there especially those that are either #Windows only or those that Dualboot to #Win, here is a proposal:
Make a 'challenge' for yourself or together with your friends and switch to #Linux on your #gaming machine for at least around 6 months.
Why? Since the release of the #SteamDeck is in the near future and #Valve is pushing Anti-Cheat systems to run on Linux through #Wine/#Proton it seems to be a good opportunity to give Linux a try, also it could help giving Linux more momentum and impact and eventually this will also help with the #ChickenEggProblem
Feel free to share this #post or even better make your own #toot or #tweet etc about this
@bonifartius This is indeed a serious concern I share with you, however Windows itself is spyware so why not put the anti cheat spyware in a secure and isolated sandbox that is not windows?
@Lamdarer because i just run games with windows and the secure and isolated sandboxes all have had leaks. hell, xen as hypervisor had enough cves (https://xenbits.xen.org/xsa/). they are just too complicated technology. anti cheat doesn't work without kernel access (and even then it's probably bs). either you just drop it and have cheaters, or you have to run a blob in kernel space and also have cheaters.
@Lamdarer i comoletely agree that.people should use free software, but just using linux as vehicle to run proprietary stuff is misguided.
@bonifartius I was more referring about having 2 different Linux systems to boot into.
Also this wasnt meant only for ppl playing games with those Anti Cheat systems but more about future Linux gamers in general, no matter the game
@Lamdarer i just don't see the use of running proprietary software on a free system 🤷♀️ like i've said, i completely agree that people should use more free software. selling free software to them because it can run closed stuff just seems wrong to me.
@bonifartius @Lamdarer most games are proprietary software.
One can argue that freedom is not binary and being able to use an free/libre OS and as much free/libre software as possible is better than not doing so.
e. g. running Adobe Photoshop on Pop!OS might be cooler than running it on MS Windows
Setting up a Windows VM with GPU passthrough is another good solution. As long as you have powerful enough hardware for the CPU/RAM overhead to not impact your usage.
Well unless the anti cheat solution you want to use refuses to run in a VM, like Valorant's which is basically a rootkit.
Basically, though valorant's is one of the most intrusive ones out there. I wouldn't run that shit on any computer I own.
I have an RX 580 and was able to set it up successfully at one point
Duak Vega 64? That's a beastly setup right there. What do you use it for?
Dual CPU as well? Damn, I couldn't even afford something like that lmao.
I have 16GB of RAM and I very rarely max it out. I don't even use any swap at all.
It's lightning fast though, it's B die running at 3800mhz with 15 CL latency.
I mean my RAM is heavily overclocked, these are not the default settings lmao.
Alongside that I have an r5 3600 running at 4.35 ghz and an rx 580 8gb running at 1400 mhz core and 2100 mhz mem
If anything this is slightly overkill for what I do lmao. At least I get short compile times though.
I couldn't go back to anything less than 64, I can feel the crawl on my work laptop with 16
Windows 10 has horrendous idle RAM usage out of the box. 2.5 GB with literally nothing extra installed is a joke.
If I ever need more, I can always buy another pair of identical sticks.
Which edition of win 10 are you using? I dalily Artix Linux on my machine.
I was using a legit ISO that I cracked after installation. I had win 10 pro n installed alongside Linux a while ago.
Here's a good tool for doing so
https://github.com/massgravel/Microsoft-Activation-Scripts
@bonifartius @Lamdarer i don't understand why anticheat is not implemented solely server-sided. It makes zero sense to make the client run some obscure software, perhaps even inside kernel space, when package spoofing is an extremely trivial, software-undetectable method which is cheap and common for hackers to do. So basically... it's worthless effort just put the energy in server side validation (which you gotta do anyway so might as well fuzz the hell out of it).
Anticheat makes no sense
@bonifartius let me rephrase that:
PERHAPS it makes sense for some reason I am not aware of. Hopefully someone knows a reason and can tell me
@Lamdarer
@Lamdarer Unfortunately it's not that simple, there is not only Steam.
Epic Game Store is quite popular know and running it on Linux is a huge pain. As for GOG games, there is no launcher so people would have to manually load their saves and think to store them back if using windows (or making backups) because there will be no cloud save.
Most MMO with their own launcher (EVE online for example won't work at all) may have issues.
The switch may be easy if you use only Steam though.
@loosy @solene @Lamdarer Additionally, though I haven't done this for a while - there was a method (some shell scripts) which would allow you to download the required items from gog, then unpack them without wine - thus allowing you to get your assets for scummvm / dosbox without actually needing wine or the gog galaxy thing (which still doesn't have a client.)
- ok, I checked now, and it has evolved into lgogdownloader, which is essentially a frontend for linux for gog. https://sites.google.com/site/gogdownloader/
There is also itch.io which is entirely usable via the web, though they have an optional client for linux (unsure if it runs on BSD's but I'd imagine it probably does or doesn't need much to change it to work.)
- of course, the older games and so on likely aren't the things we need to test heavily, as those already have heavy testing - more the windows-only things (which quite frankly I don't like much)
@Lamdarer no, i won't taint my free software system with the spyware anticheat is. that shit can stay where it belongs, on the seperate windows hard drive.