I think Microsoft and their partners have been dreaming about turning PCs into fully locked down platforms for a long time, completely unrelated to gaming. Hardware DRM including display devices and cables, and only running “trusted” software is the end goal.
I think the problem is that game publishers also want the cheapest and laziest solutions. What EA (and others) are doing now are basically “give us full control of your computer so we can do whatever we want” with their kernel level anti-cheats. Server side anti-cheat requires more processing that they have to pay for, and requires more work to develop heuristics and other algorithms to detect cheaters.
Would be interesting to know why some people downvoted this comment, if they think there’s some reason to not play The Finals on Linux. I’ve only done the tutorial so far, and the gameplay seems somewhat similar to Apex, it’s also f2p, and uses EAC so currently no issues with anti-cheat. Might not look like an indie game but it feels like a decent alternative to Apex.
Seems like my “fuck EA I’m not giving them money ever again” policy is beginning to pay off :)
I bought a Razer Basilisk 3 because it was the only mouse where I could reach both thumb buttons with the fingertip-ish grip I use. Wasn’t fully supported by Linux software at first, but worst case I could program it on Windows which I had on a dual boot at the time. Now that I can use it with Polychromatic and OpenRazer it even works better on Linux. On Windows the Razer software won’t let me save individual LED colours to the mouse, and needs to be running all the time in order to do that…
My guess is that Microsoft will provide their own kernel level anticheat to game developers, using a secure API which will be impossible to emulate with Wine etc.
We just had Windows Update brick itself due to a faulty update. The fix required updating them manually while connected to the office network, making them unusable for 2-3 hours. Another issue we’ve had is that Windows appears to be monopolizing virtualization HW acceleration for some memory integrity protection, which made our VMs slow and laggy. Fixing it required a combination of shell commands, settings changes and IT support remotely changing some permission, but the issue also comes back after some updates.
Though I’ve also had quite a lot of Windows problems at home, when I was still using it regularly. Not saying Linux usage has been problem free, but there I can at least fix things. Windows has a tendency to give unusable error messages and make troubleshooting difficult, and even when you figure out what’s wrong you’re at the mercy of Microsoft if you are allowed to change things on your own computer, due to their operating system’s proprietary nature.
Already? I’m still using Fedora 39 since that’s the only version supported by CUDA Toolkit :S
On Linux, AMD GPUs work significantly better than Nvidia ones. If you have a choice, choose an AMD
Unless you’re interested in AI stuff, then Nvidia is still the best choice. Some libraries are HW accelerated on AMD, and hopefully more will work in the future.
Ofc I know it’s not meant to be literal, but talking about killing black people or not is too direct. The subjects people like this usually want to talk about tend to be more layered, e.g. “what should we do about the Jew problem” so that if you take the bait you’ll implicitly accept that “the Jew problem” exists to begin with.
Isn’t (I|U) equivalent to ([IU])?
Personally I’m not looking an OS that is “not so bad”, the initial impression should be “this is great” :)
Ubuntu is kind of the “Windows” of the Linux world
That’s also the thing, I switched to Linux because I hated using Windows, and I don’t like how Microsoft operates. The last think I want is a distribution which tries to be Windows made by a company which tries to be Microsoft. It’s of course an exaggeration, and Ubuntu doesn’t do EEE and patent trolling as far as I know, but at least for me it feels like they’re going in the wrong direction when they keep reinventing the wheel, forcing solutions that users don’t want, and generally trying to create a “one size fits all” desktop. I’m not against it, Ubuntu is probably a good choice for some users, it just doesn’t fit me. I used Xubuntu for many years, and I also tried both Gnome and Unity at different points, but currently I use Fedora KDE.
Not entirely clear but perhaps OP is talking about blocking unwanted outgoing reqjests? E.g. anti-features and such since they mention traffic from their apps.
Ah, I didn’t expect the results to be different when looking at the overview, this is what I saw…
Any way to break down that “Other” and see what it contains? If it counts Ubuntu 22.04.4 LTS and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS as different operating systems there might be some more Ubuntu versions hiding in there.
I looked at the August 2024 results and SteamOS was not mentioned anywhere in the OS version section.
Probably because everybody with a Steam Desk shows up as Arch in the survey.
It did alright, don’t think I saw that many obvious cheaters in BF1. BF5 would occasionally have obvious cheaters, but I would hope they get banned eventually just because it’s over the top (shooting people through walls, infinite ammo, perfect aim). Difficult to say with more subtle cheats, but I suppose if they’re indistinguishable from players who are just good at the game then I think most people won’t ever notice.
On the flip side I got permabanned from multiplayer in BF5 after EA falsely accused me of cheating, though I suppose that could’ve happened with any kind of anti-cheat, and could’ve been fixed by having half-competent support.
I think FairFight is the old anti-cheat, which at least used to be server side only.
Unfortunately most Battlefield games worked fine with Wine/Proton for years since EA used server side AC, so they already have our money.
Apex with EAC worked perfectly fine on Linux for the last 2 years, EA just decided to break it by replacing EAC with their own anti-cheat which is Windows only.