With Proton and Steam Play, many Windows games now work on Linux

Because anti-cheat software is buggy, triggering a kernel crash which makes the whole machine unusable is a real possibility, additionally by running in kernel mode, the software bypasses all the OS protections, this can end up terribly if there's an exploit.

Weirdly, on an older-ish Mac I'm having lots of trouble making 90s games work in Wine—basically, out of a dozen games only ‘Grand Prix Legends’ runs, since it kept being patched by the community for the past twenty years. Judging by the app db, Wine has some special relationship with Linux and Nvidia. Mac and Intel, not so much—I can have desktop software and not much else. Otherwise I'm stuck with PS1 emulation.

I have craving for SWAT 2 and I must satisfy it, even if it means installing Windows 98 on the NAS.

It's also not as trivial as just flipping to "Linux" in a combo box and re-exporting. Getting the game to run well requires work, from writing additional platform dependent code, through fixing issues caused by changing the graphics backend (unless you use OpenGL on Windows, which you probably don't) to a lot of additional QA needed to make sure your Linux build still runs after the latest changes.

I'm a solo game developer (working on [1] right now) and while I get many more requests for a native Linux version than I expected, I'm still reluctant to invest the necessary development time. It's ironic, but the very fact that Proton is so solid makes it even less likely that a Linux build will exist, since I'm fairly certain people will be able to play Slipways under Proton with hardly any issues if they want to.

[1]: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1264280/Slipways

I'm going to point out that if you want to go down this route, it is insufficient to just check that the base drivers are untampered with and signed by Microsoft or whatever vendor still.

You now maintain a list of potentially vulnerable drivers that can be used as a jumping off point (such as virtually every motherboard RGB or fan control system), and ban users that have these or hard-disable them at boot. There are some games that have caused machines to overheat by disabling cheat-jumpoffable fan controllers.

On top of that, you effectively have to maintain a whitelist of acceptable drivers, because cheat vendors are registering limited companies by the thousands (only $20 in the UK), getting an EV/codesigning cert, and signing their own drivers. Higher end cheats cost enough to offset this, and there might be less than 5-6 people using a particular certificate. Some of the people behind these also release vaguely-useful legal tools signed with the same certificates to get a large install base for them so they don't stick out.

That being said, IMO as a player, this is invasive as hell, and you should not be crawling through my flash drives, identifying my mouse, killing LogitechMacroSoftware.exe, etc. I'd rather you just collect snap/targetting/click timings server-side and run anomaly analysis on those rather than digging an asshole into my computer.

Also, now I have 5 different "kernel anticheats" running 24/7 simultaneously, half of them are horrifically written and known-insecure, and the other half need to figure out how to not explode spectacularly when the broken half tries to probe and kill it.

Korean MMOs are particularly bad for this and when forcefully uninstalled might permanently destroy disk access, make Windows non-genuine and deactivate it, and send all their data over plaintext (no TLS) with a bizarre, homegrown "encryption" method that is trivially breakable to a bare IP somewhere.

With KMMOs as an example (many of these reward you for staying logged in, have daily rewards, and similar; the game itself is fairly low resource when minimised), GameGuard and HackShield and XIGNCODE constantly have slap-fights where they bluescreen or flop over or die if you try to run multiple of them simultaneously and they try probing and killing each others' services for trying to tamper with themselves. It's like that ridiculous "what happens if three programs all try to demand Always On Top for their window", except give all of them heavy weaponry. These also have severe NIH syndrome for things like homemade shitty crypto and plaintext everything.

Not OP but I had a terrible experience installing Windows 10 on my machine. UEFI boot, NVME root disk. Windows would boot the installer, but would refuse to install. Disabling UEFI would cause it to install but there were issues so I had to bite the bullet and keep trying UEFI.

I had to install linux(because Windows recovery is terrible and can't do much), fiddle around with pre-creating a partition table on the format it wanted, and then eventually got it to work. Don't ask me how, I spent hours trying every combination under the sun. Windows error messages are very cryptic and not at all helpful.