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Ubisoft's FOR HONOR will block SteamOS / Linux players starting September 10

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Re: Ubisoft's FOR HONOR will block SteamOS / Linux players starting September 10

#71

Post by john_strinlai »

AndriyKunitsyn wrote: post #70
john_strinlai wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

trust is not binary. i trust my preinstalled system fonts more than i trust vanguard, as an example. different goals, different people involved, different scope of access, different amount of review, different amount of use = different levels of trust

Absolutely, and we can discuss the amounts of this trust. Some people trust the anti-cheat devs. (I do too, on a PC that is used for almost nothing but gaming.)

okay, if you agree with that, i am confused about your initial comment comparing anti-cheat to a font.

it appears like you are saying "if you trust the font to be okay, you should trust anti-cheat". but we've just cleared up that they have wildly different levels of trust, due to their wildly different access, size, purpose, etc.

Re: Ubisoft's FOR HONOR will block SteamOS / Linux players starting September 10

#72

Post by rwz »

caconym_ wrote: post #65
Ithildin wrote: post #33

Going forward, I simply will not be purchasing any game that does not work on Linux. I realize that I'll be missing out on some titles, but Windows simply isn't worth the headache. CachyOS has been working great for me. Proton has been amazing. I have had zero problems with the games I typically play -- some of which are multiplayer. Luckily, I have not run into anti-cheat issues yet.

Same. There are obviously few or no hard technical blockers preventing Valve and the Linux community from supporting any game that runs on Windows, unless it's been specifically engineered to block Linux, and publishers of those games will simply not be getting my money anymore. If Windows was still as pleasant and non-invasive as eg KDE Plasma on Cachy, it would be a different story, but I haven't used it in months…

> There are obviously few or no hard technical blockers preventing Valve and the Linux community from supporting any game that runs on Windows

The announcement is a proof that your statement here is incorrect. Ubisoft is not banning Linux because they hate you and your money, but because there's a hard technical blocker to implementing an efficient anti-cheat system on Linux and the cost of overcoming this technical blocker is presumed to be higher than the loss of revenue they're incurring from losing your business.

Re: Ubisoft's FOR HONOR will block SteamOS / Linux players starting September 10

#73

Post by mihaelm »

caconym_ wrote: post #68
mihaelm wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pulling for Microsoft to create an XboxOS for PC you can just freely install on any machine, as that's about the only thing I care about regarding Windows. Then I could see myself dualbooting that when I want to play my Xbox collection. And it'd be nice to build a beefy machine to max them out on, once the PC component prices settle a bit. They're playing with that with the Xbox Full Screen Experience on ROG Xbox…

Given how dogshit Windows 11 is, and how dogshit the Xbox-branded apps have consistently been in the last 10 years or so (it's genuinely impressive how bad they are), it's hard to see why a new Microsoft thing wouldn't have all the same problems. They just don't make software to serve the user anymore.

I like the software side on my Series X, so if they can bring that over to PC as an OS, that'd be great. I agree the Xbox on PC experience hasn't been stellar so far and I hope they ditch that app with the next generation, for the sake of current userbase. It was serviceable at best in my Windows 10 days.

For anything not gaming related, I have Linux or MacOS.

Re: Ubisoft's FOR HONOR will block SteamOS / Linux players starting September 10

#74

Post by buzer »

Someone in EU should try to make a complaint to the local authority who is enforcing ePrivacy Directive regarding anti cheats in general. Despite what people think ePD isn't limited to cookies and rather also applies all data read or stored in "terminal equipment" via use of electronic communications networks. I would say anti cheat should usually qualify. If they want to do it without consent then they need to show that it's strictly necessary for the service user specifically requested (and that applies for each piece of data written/read, including the OS information).

There's good argument that anti cheat itself would need to be consent based. If you don't accept then you simply don't get placed in games with users who have it enabled.

Re: Ubisoft's FOR HONOR will block SteamOS / Linux players starting September 10

#75

Post by AndriyKunitsyn »

john_strinlai wrote: post #71
AndriyKunitsyn wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely, and we can discuss the amounts of this trust. Some people trust the anti-cheat devs. (I do too, on a PC that is used for almost nothing but gaming.)

okay, if you agree with that, i am confused about your initial comment comparing anti-cheat to a font. it appears like you are saying "if you trust the font to be okay, you should trust anti-cheat". but we've just cleared up that they have wildly different levels of trust, due to their wildly different access, size, purpose, etc.

I mean - trust is subjective, right? Some people just don't care, some people are okay with the risk-reward tradeoff. I agree it's a bit absurd to compare vanguard to a font, but the parent comment was pretty unapologetic too.

Re: Ubisoft's FOR HONOR will block SteamOS / Linux players starting September 10

#76

Post by [deleted] »

Ithildin wrote: post #33

Going forward, I simply will not be purchasing any game that does not work on Linux. I realize that I'll be missing out on some titles, but Windows simply isn't worth the headache. CachyOS has been working great for me. Proton has been amazing. I have had zero problems with the games I typically play -- some of which are multiplayer. Luckily, I have not run into anti-cheat issues yet.

[deleted]

Re: Ubisoft's FOR HONOR will block SteamOS / Linux players starting September 10

#77

Post by [deleted] »

Insanity wrote: post #14

I recently moved to Linux for gaming. Last time I tried was around 2008 and I guess I was reluctant to move gaming to Linux because that experience was far from smooth. Honestly, it's like magic that I can run "The Finals" on highest settings without any hiccup. It literally 'just works'. Happy that I could completely get rid of Windows (it was only there for gaming). It's still hard to believe, given back in 2008 wh…

[deleted]

Re: Ubisoft's FOR HONOR will block SteamOS / Linux players starting September 10

#78

Post by tempfile »

john_strinlai wrote: post #21
tempfile wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So they should have to return the money you paid, to account for their mistake in selling you the game.

> account for their mistake in selling you the game. i hate ubisoft as much as the next person, but if they listed the game as only supporting windows when it launched, and someone bought it for linux despite it not being supported, ubisoft did not make a "mistake" in selling the game to them. the buyer made a decision to purchase the game for an unsupported system. (the rule i follow, which hasn't gone wrong yet, is…

The case for a refund seems totally obvious. Why should you get to keep my money? I paid for a product and I did not get it. Selling it incurs no cost on you and I have received none of the benefit of the transaction. It's not like I ate a meal and then decided I wanted to order something else.

This all presumes of course that it is legitimate to ban people from using certain computing environments when running software for whatever reason you feel like. Lots of people don't think this is legitimate at all, which makes sense, because people don't really try to justify it. It's legitimate to want to ban cheaters, this is just not a reasonable means of enforcing that, because there are legitimate players who want to play the game and can't because of this policy.

Re: Ubisoft's FOR HONOR will block SteamOS / Linux players starting September 10

#79

Post by bigbuppo »

Ithildin wrote: post #33

Going forward, I simply will not be purchasing any game that does not work on Linux. I realize that I'll be missing out on some titles, but Windows simply isn't worth the headache. CachyOS has been working great for me. Proton has been amazing. I have had zero problems with the games I typically play -- some of which are multiplayer. Luckily, I have not run into anti-cheat issues yet.

I've been in the same boat, but with mac. I'm tired of keeping a windows machine around just to play a few games.

Using a Windows 11 machine stirs up some old trauma I try to forget.

Re: Ubisoft's FOR HONOR will block SteamOS / Linux players starting September 10

#80

Post by tapoxi »

trashb wrote: post #34

This is funny since they are literally using "Easy Anti Cheat" and that fully supports Linux. From what I understand Easy Anti Cheat, makes it very easy for developers to run on Linux, basically it is a compile setting to support it. It is one of the anti-cheat providers that had decent Linux support since the beginning. Back before Proton and when it was new developers often denied requests for turning on Linux supp…

EAC supports Linux, but by doing so you're disabling a number of security features since you're making the anti-cheat run entirely in userspace.

Remember these games aren't Linux native either, so it allows Windows-using cheaters to lie to the process that they're on Linux and to only use userspace protection. The cheat then runs in kernel space and remains invisible.

The only realistic way to solve this on Linux is enforcing secure boot w/trusted kernels and then running the anti-cheat in sandboxed eBPF kernel space. Embark is looking at this approach.

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