Comment Re:I was surprised to see marvel rivals (Score 1) 37
What is it about linux that makes anti cheat so much harder to make work on it? Admin/system rights management that's more pro-user?
Heterogeneity.
A lot of anti-cheat solutions rely on an index of known safe software stacks, which are determined by taking checksums of various library dependencies. On Linux, the same library may be compiled with different options by thousands of different distributors, may have a wide range of versions still supported... The lazy technique that most anti-cheats rely on to distinguish real system libraries from hacked ones is impossible under such conditions. Not to mention, some of the components games use to do this are themselves intended to be installed at the kernel level, which is a problem when your game now needs to run under thousands of new kernels. Most games with anti-cheat that run under Linux now don't require a kernel component and only recognize libraries from a few common distros or Steam Runtime.
Strong anti-cheat that would work on Linux is possible, but companies mostly take the easy way out and don't bother with it. Instead of just taking checksums from libraries, what they should be doing is sanity testing them (does this random number generator actually produce random numbers?) and checking for unrecognized shims (does this C standard library link to something it shouldn't, like another a C standard library?).
WINE/Proton is also a factor here, because it involves a valid use of library shims. A cheater might use a library shim over DirectX to see through walls or modify textures, but a Linux user does out of necessity simply to make the game work (DXVK). Whatever shim detection there is needs to make exceptions on Linux to account for most libraries bundled with Proton.
