The issue of anti-cheat on Linux

Summary

The number of people choosing Linux as their primary operating system to play games has been slowly but steadily going up, at least according to the Steam hardware survey. This is most likely because of the Steam Deck release and the increasingly obnoxious features being added to Windows. If you switch to Linux today, you’ll probably be surprised by how many games run out of the box just fine (mostly due to the Windows compatibility layer Proton built right into Steam), except for basically all competitive multiplayer games that utilize any sort of anti-cheat technology. Just to name a few, here is a list sorted by concurrent player count from ProtonDB: Those are just games on Steam. Then there’s also Valorant and League of Legends, which both now use Vanguard, so they also won’t launch at all. While you can play Counter-Strike 2 on VAC-secured servers natively on Linux, anyone trying to play more seriously will likely be playing on FACEIT or ESEA, which both also won’t work. Now I can finally get to the point of the article… Why am I writing this? As someone who uses Linux daily, I would love to see these games support it, but I just don’t see that happening any time soon. Many people in the Linux community are frustrated by the fact that these anti-cheat solutions are stopping them from playing their favorite games. It also doesn’t help that some are fear-mongering about kernel-level anti-cheat solutions and spreading misinformation. In this article, I want to give you a high-level overview of how modern anti-cheat solutions work (which will hopefully be understandable even for non-technical people) and then explain why anti-cheat solutions in their current state just cannot work on Linux, as well as what the alternatives are. The basics What is a videogame cheat? We could talk for hours about whether all sorts of macros and exploits should be considered cheats, but the main thing that comes to people’s minds when talking about multiplayer games is an external pro...