The stereotype is of the haughty Linux user, but fuck me all I ever see in these discussions is Windows users being belittling assholes.
Unfortunately those pesky live service games that have the most player counts are disproportionately represented in that 10%.
They tend to require installing a rootkit on your own computer. I wouldn’t buy them even if they did support Linux.
I think this is a higher percentage than Windows 11 if you include 16-bit ones from the 90s and early 2000s. (What was wrong with NTVDM64, anyway?)
I would love to swap to Linux if we could get games with kernel level anti cheat to be compatible.
I’m gonna be that guy, most of them are in some way or another. The devs literally decided to not bother pressing the button that enables compatibility because they don’t feel like it.
For me its 100% of games, but sure, havent tried all games that exist…
Typically the competitive multiplayer ones fail because of kernel-level anticheat.
This keeps getting repeated as a blanket statement and it irks me a bit. More than half of the top ten most played games on steam on any given day work. There’s a small handful of games that don’t work that fit into the competitive multiplayer genre and an even smaller handful that are actually popular.
To be clear, I’m not irk’ed with you, just that this myth that gets passed around a lot hasn’t caught up to reality.
Top games by player count by daily players (numbers are peak in 24 hrs)(skipping anything that doesn’t qualify as competitive multiplayer):
- CS 2 - ✅ - 1.4 mil
- BF 6 - ❌ - 413k
- Dota 2 - ✅ - 761k
- Pubg - ❌ - 620k
- Arc Raiders - ✅ - 322k
- Apex Legends - ❌ - 155k
- War Thunder - ✅ - 78k
- Delta force - ❌ ✅ (work around exists) - 182k
- Marvel rivals - ✅ - 83k
- Dead by Daylight - ✅ - 66k
- Naraka: Bladepoint - ✅ - 120k
- Rust - ❌ (some servers do work though) - 130k
✅ Top 20 total - 2.83 mil ❌ Top 20 total - 1.5 mil (including Delta force)
Idk. Having just crunched the numbers I guess it’s fair to warn people about some borked Anti-Cheat games but I wish people would caveat by saying the majority of games people play even in the competitive multiplayer scene work. And it’s only going to get better i’d argue, although games like bf6 being a recent launch that didn’t work is a bummer. As the percentage of Linux users climb they’ll be increasingly incentivized to find a solution.
League isn’t on here, that would skew the numbers pro-windows.
Switching to linux had me cold turkey league of legends im a healthier happier person now.
the real cold turkey was Riot killing linux support last year. Seems like there wasn’t enough linux players at the time for them to walk back that decision.
Okay, real talk.
I know there’s probably 100 videos on this, but I don’t have time to watch any of them right now…
How much performance is lost/gained from using Linux to play games via proton?
I’m certain any game with a native Linux version will work great, I’m mostly concerned with the ones that need some kind of emulation layer.
colloquially, I hear “5-10% overhead depending on the game and if you’re running mods”
On the other hand, some testing has found that running games on Linux with Proton is actually faster than with Windows on the same hardware, because Windows is such a resource hog.
The hardware in in this test being the Legion Go steamdeck rival.
Unfortunately the 10% that don’t include the biggest, most played games in the world.
Like Elden ring and nightreign? Hugely successful games. Play them all the time in Linux.
Hows battlefield 6 going on linux? Fortnite? Black Ops 6? Warzone? PUBG? Apex Legends? GTA 5 / GTA Online?
I don’t play any of those.
My point is, there’s loads of great popular multiplayer games that don’t use garbage kernel level anticheat.
But Elden Ring and Elden Ring Nightreign are not multiplayer games…?
You can also add many more of the top most popular multiplayer games to my list, I just listed a few of the biggest. You won’t be playing GTA6, which is likely to be the biggest game of all time, on Linux. Black Ops 7, the biggest release of this year, won’t be on Linux.
You obviously know nothing about these two games lol. Yes they are multiplayer. Nightreign is also designed to primarily be played 3 players online at a time.
Co-op, duels, and “invasions” lol. Not what we’re talking about here. Elden ring is a single player game for all that any one cares or knows.
We’re definitely not talking about co-op when anyone says multiplayer.
You need to learn the definition of “multi”, then.
This. Plus anti-cheat is still a removed on Linux.
Anticheat works fine. Just not the kernel level nasty ones. But that’s a good thing.
But that’s a good thing.
If you don’t want to be able to play the biggest games released, I guess…
You’re looking at it wrong. They need to not invade our kernel.
For this type of anti-cheat yes, they do.
You can choose not to let them, it just means you can’t play the games. Do you believe they’re installing malicious code or something in the anti-cheat?
Exactly. This is not a type I need. My kernel does not need to be invaded. It’s literally enabling spyware and you’d never know it.
Do I believe it? I don’t know. But it’s possible and I’d never know, so fuck that.
- ESEA Bitcoin miner incident (2013) In April 2013 ESEA (a third-party matchmaking + anti-cheat service) had a built-in bitcoin-miner component in their client. It was discovered by users in May. � XDA Developers +1 Because the ESEA client ran with high privileges (as a driver/anti-cheat style client), the mining component was harder to detect and harder to remove compared to normal user-mode software. � XDA Developers The company settled for a $1 M payout. � Lesson: Granting deep OS access to a client means if it goes rogue (or is malicious) you get real damage (mining, rootkit-like behaviour, etc). XDA Developers
- Riot Vanguard (for VALORANT) and related complaints Vanguard is the kernel-level anti-cheat used by Riot Games in VALORANT. � Wikipedia +1 It has drawn criticism for its always-running behaviour (some users report it loads at boot even before the game). � Gist +1 Some users report system instability (blue screens) after installation. � Lesson: Even if the anti-cheat isn’t malicious per se, because it’s so deep, any defect or compatibility issue can cause system-wide pain (crashes, instability). XDA Developers
- Theoretical/privacy risk: drivers acting like rootkits Academic work (“If It Looks Like a Rootkit…”) analyses KLAC and finds that some solutions behave very similarly to rootkits: intercepting kernel calls, hiding modules, monitoring broad system activity. � arXiv Articles note that allowing game companies to insert drivers at boot time that monitor “outside the game” sets a “potentially dangerous precedent”. � Lesson: Even when everything is “legal”, the architectural model has intrinsic risk: trusted code has extremely high privileges; if trust is misplaced (malicious dev, insider threat, compromise) you have huge exposure. How-To Geek
- Example of “residual services” / bad uninstall behaviour A Steam forum post (for game “Delta Force (2025 video game)”) reported that the anti-cheat driver “ACE-BASE / AntiCheatExpert” remained active even after game uninstall, caused conflicts, etc. � Lesson: When kernel-level drivers aren’t cleanly managed/uninstalled, they can linger as “shadow” privileged components, increasing risk surface. Steam Community
- Corporate/State concerns & data-privacy An article points out that KLAC by its nature has full system visibility (“what this means is that this type of spyware can exfiltrate sensitive information…”) and calls out potential misuse—especially worrying when combined with acquisitions or state-influence (e.g., the purchase of a KLAC-provider by a sovereign entity). � Lesson: Beyond just “can it crash my PC”, there’s question of what else the driver could observe (system activity, other processes, telemetry) and whether user has meaningful control.
That’s a lot of “it possibly could, but it never has happened with huge reputable billion dollar companies”. Also seems like an AI generated list, or copied from Wikipedia? If that’s the best you can find, yeah there’s no issue.
No one should be giving some random anti-cheat program made by who knows who kennel level access, but one by EA? Fine. EA aren’t in the business of getting bankrupted by installing rootkit malware with their video game anti-cheat.
Calling anti-cheat “spyware” is dumb.
100% of Windows games run on Windows. Just saying.
I’ve heard that there’s some older windows games that don’t run in newer versions of Windows but do run in proton
Space Cadet Pinball was removed from Windows, but it comes stock with Bazzite.
Just play it anywhere.
Right, but you realise that’s a reverse engineered version of the game? The original can’t be played on Windows. One glorious project to save a beloved game is a noble endeavour, but the same cannot be done for all the Windows games like it that cannot be played anymore. Spore is barely playable these days.
Right, but you realise that’s a reverse engineered version of the game?
The source article we’re commenting on here largely argues that Linux is only halfway decent for gaming because of Wine, a reverse-engineered version of the Windows ABI/API. Are reverse-engineered versions a valid point or not?
Wine is not an emulator. It’s a translation layer, which enables running the original software. Linux with Wine supports old windows games better than new windows does. In the next few years we’ll reach the point where Linux can play more games than Windows can, and it may already be here.
Wine is not an emulator.
I know that Wine zealots use that as a meme, but please note that I haven’t said it was. (Not that it mattered for the users anyway.)
In the next few years we’ll reach the point where Linux can play more games than Windows can
Citation needed.
Even the 16 bit ones? ;)
Hmm, while interesting, that doesn’t seem like it comes with windows itself :P
I’m sure there are Windows distributions which have some DOS emulator preinstalled. ;-)
Linux users hate reality, so they downvote comments. Made my day.
I’ve never seen a harder hard-on than the hard-on Lemmy has for Linux.
More power to you guys, I’m just saying, Linux circlejerking represents like a third of the posts I see when browsing All.
So you are saying that we should do it harder? Acknowledged boss!
