I was thinking about the anti-cheat scenario and this popped on my mine. Consider the following scenario.

Valve comes out with an alternate OS for the Steam Deck called “Steam OS Secure” which supports anti-cheats. Special proprietary blobs were added to the OS, in collaboration with the game devs, which allow it to monitor metrics at the kernel level. These anti-cheats will only be able to run on an unmodified Steam Deck which gets disabled the moment you “modify” your Deck.

(I’m unsure what “modify” means here. Maybe if the user creates a root password or if a new layer has been added on top of SteamOS)

This will come pre-installed with the Deck (Steam Deck 3 maybe), but a seperate OS without the proprietary blobs is also available and can be downloaded/installed right from the Deck itself. This can be switched anytime but it’s a lengthy procedure. Obviously, the one without the anti-cheat performs better.

What do you think about this? Would you approve this? Will your perception towards Valve change? Will it be better for gaming over all?

Edit: I can understand the dislikes. No one wants RING-0 anti-cheat on Linux. But I just want to have a discussion on this. I don’t see game devs making exceptions their game only on Linux in the near future.

  • Toes♀@ani.social
    1·
    6 months ago

    Hey its unfortunate you are being downvoted since this is about a active problem and all you’re doing is bringing attention to it.

    It’s not that the OS doesn’t support such tools, (anyone can choose to run a 3rd party kernel module) its the devs of the anticheat software that refuse to do the work needed to make it a reality.

    The other problem is that such software is unlikely to work correctly out of the box across the plethora of available operating systems and configurations. Just targeting the steam deck would be received rather negatively and probably illicit chilling effects across the community.

    You could theoretically, do what NVIDIA has done for their driver and opensource just the parts needed to make it work for your OS. However, that could potentially be used as a means to circumvent the purpose of the tool.

    All anti-cheat software is a cat and mouse game and any determined group will eventually circumvent any client side means which speaks to architectural problems with the game. Which could potentially be insurmountable without considerable investment in server sided solutions.

    However, the creation of client sided kernel modules would at least bring it close to par with the Windows experience.