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Valve's Proton Has Enabled 7000 Windows Games on Linux

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Re: Valve's Proton Has Enabled 7000 Windows Games on Linux

#271
post #15

EAC (Easy Anti-Cheat) is the main reason why I've not switched from Windows to a full-time Linux desktop. While EAC does include support for Linux[1], it's up to the developer/publisher to enable it. 1. https://www.easy.ac/en-us/support/game/guides/os/ edit: Included EACs unabbreviated form as well as a link to supported operating systems.

There has been some success in just implementing more missing Windows APIs that EAC needed. This allowed a few titles with EAC to run.

EAC will update themselves each time a public method to defeat them is published since this is exactly what you would do if you wanted to run a cheat.

Re: Valve's Proton Has Enabled 7000 Windows Games on Linux

#272
post #28

Proton is neat for sure, but unfortunately modern anti-cheat solutions expect Windows and will not allow Linux clients to connect. There's also a few games that I expected to work but simply won't launch for me, like Elder Scrolls Online. I'm a fan of the Linux desktop, but for me the easiest solution is to have a dedicated Linux PC (right now an XPS 13 Developer) and a Windows machine for playing video games. I don'…

Proton is in the works to support anti-cheat. Vital kernel support was recently merged. I don't know the details, only that it is a goal of proton and hopefully will work. Many games use the same anti-cheat so if everyone cooperates it could work out.

I give it 0% chance that Proton will support anti cheat. How does an anti cheat checking "fake" windows kernel structures in linux actually accomplish any anti cheat?

Re: Valve's Proton Has Enabled 7000 Windows Games on Linux

#273
I am incredibly grateful for proton -- it mostly just works. However, configuring it without steam itself is a bit of a pain.

Is there a good UI to get it to work with gog.com games? I don't really want to buy on Steam because of DRM worries, but I do throw them a bone periodically entirely because of proton.

Re: Valve's Proton Has Enabled 7000 Windows Games on Linux

#274
post #37
post #28

Proton is neat for sure, but unfortunately modern anti-cheat solutions expect Windows and will not allow Linux clients to connect. There's also a few games that I expected to work but simply won't launch for me, like Elder Scrolls Online. I'm a fan of the Linux desktop, but for me the easiest solution is to have a dedicated Linux PC (right now an XPS 13 Developer) and a Windows machine for playing video games. I don'…

From a very personal point of view, I'm happy with anti-cheats not working on linux. Some of them are flat out rootkits, see valorant's anti-cheat.

If the price for not getting that crap installed on my system is a few triple A multiplayer games, then so be it.

Re: Valve's Proton Has Enabled 7000 Windows Games on Linux

#275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rank anti-cheating as a problem with a similar effect but without the ethical concerns of DRM. Few customers want DRM, but nearly all customers want fair games, yet anti-cheat is just as hostile to "non-intended" environments as DRM.

The difference between DRM and anti-cheat is just semantics. The license says "do not cheat" and the software enforces that license = DRM. But lots of players really don't care about "fair". Any game with a large mod community, mostly single player games like KSP or minecraft, generally stays far away from any form of DRM. The entire concept of "cheating" doesn't really exist in such games.

> Any game with a large mod community, mostly single player games like KSP or minecraft, generally stays far away from any form of DRM.

Many major first person shooters stand as counterpoints to your claim. Most Valve games for example are incredibly mod friendly, at the same time Steam was a pioneer in online DRM and Valve Anti-Cheat (VAC) is generally reasonably effective.

Even games where the anti-cheat isn't as mod-friendly as Valve's often offer modes where the game can be launched with anti-cheat disabled but you lose access to public matchmaking and ranked play, only being able to play on private games and/or servers that have turned off anti-cheat themselves. The PC port of Halo does this well.

> The entire concept of "cheating" doesn't really exist in such games.

For the record Minecraft does in fact have anti-cheat, but it's mostly just about illegal movements versus anything else, flight without creative privileges in particular. Anything beyond that is up to the server operator and their chosen plugins. Cheating is still definitely a thing, at least when playing survival with other people, but what defines cheating is up to each group to decide for themselves.

---

DRM and anti-cheat do have the same big picture goal in the end, prevent the user from tampering with the application, but I do agree with the above poster that it is very different ethically. We all want our ranked play to be free of cheaters.

Re: Valve's Proton Has Enabled 7000 Windows Games on Linux

#276
post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

not sure why you are downvoted. You speak the truth, and as usual get downvoted without a reply. multiplayer game have the choices: a) ship game with malware/trojan to try to prevent cheats, or b) open up for cheats (even if client side only, like see trhu walls) Most popular games chose option A (and still fail preventing both client side and remote hacks)

Another option is to develop server side AI that can detect some non human behavior or behavior patterns that are cheats. It's not full protection but for sure more appropriate than putting rootkits on the client side.

oh that can't backfire at all *sarcasm

here is another idea: proper ranking of player abilities! crazy right? something so simple should be a day-one feature right? that would put all the hackers together and they could even compete in their own hacking league... 100% of clients satisfied!

now think about game companies failing to put that single feature to work correctly, what changes do you think a AI that detect human behaviour have or working well in that space? :(

Re: Valve's Proton Has Enabled 7000 Windows Games on Linux

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My Valve Index works fine for me (both native and Proton), as long as I keep SteamVR on the linux_v1.14 branch. It does have some issues keeping up sometimes, but that's probably mostly my ancient GPU (AMD RX480).

The RX 480 is far from ancient and is probably one of the best cards that I've used. When I RMA'd my RX 5700XT (which still crashes after RMA), this thing was a champ. This card is still king for 1080p gaming and can handle 1440p too.

It is almost 5 years old and several generations back. Perhaps not "ancient" but it's aging.

From the 480 there was the 580, Vega 56/64/VII, RX 5700 and now the 6800.

From a few random benchmark site checks online the 6800 is over three times faster than a 480.

Admittedly, to actually buy a 6800 series it is probably at least three times the price of a new 480.

Re: Valve's Proton Has Enabled 7000 Windows Games on Linux

#278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference between DRM and anti-cheat is just semantics. The license says "do not cheat" and the software enforces that license = DRM. But lots of players really don't care about "fair". Any game with a large mod community, mostly single player games like KSP or minecraft, generally stays far away from any form of DRM. The entire concept of "cheating" doesn't really exist in such games.

> The difference between DRM and anti-cheat is just semantics Not really - DRM = anti-copying/anti-piracy, anti-cheat is self-explanatory. Both sometimes employ similar strategies (anti-tampering/poking around with executables, linked libraries or memory), but they are not the same thing

That's one view, but I'd argue that they are both variations on the general problem of "how to run software on a computer without letting the owner of that computer actually control the software". When it's against piracy, the goal is to make sure that the software can refuse to run if it's not correctly licensed or to make sure that the user can't send its output to a recording, and when it's against cheating the goal is to make sure that the user can't modify or view the game state except through the standard game UI, but both revolve around denying the user power over software executing on their hardware.

Re: Valve's Proton Has Enabled 7000 Windows Games on Linux

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dropped the "native Linux or nothing" mindset sometime in 2013 when I saw the harm it did to developers. As a disproportionately vocal minority comprising 50% of bug requests, making Linux users happy was pretty literally taking food out of some dev's mouths. The two goals that actually needed to be achieved were preventing market monopolies and enabling smaller devs, which platform agnosticism has been a welcome a…

>a disproportionately vocal minority comprising 50% of bug requests I doubt that this is generally true based off the discussions I've seen in the Steam forums for various games.

It could also be true in a good way. Would it be so hard to claim that Linux users are more likely to report bugs, so the difference is not "Linux users are whiny" but "Windows users saw the same bugs and just suffered or stopped buying your program silently, while Linux users saw bugs and actually told you about it"?

Re: Valve's Proton Has Enabled 7000 Windows Games on Linux

#280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dropped the "native Linux or nothing" mindset sometime in 2013 when I saw the harm it did to developers. As a disproportionately vocal minority comprising 50% of bug requests, making Linux users happy was pretty literally taking food out of some dev's mouths. The two goals that actually needed to be achieved were preventing market monopolies and enabling smaller devs, which platform agnosticism has been a welcome a…

>a disproportionately vocal minority comprising 50% of bug requests I doubt that this is generally true based off the discussions I've seen in the Steam forums for various games.

This was circa 2013. Unity3D had barely included build options for Linux publishing, and it was a much less mature time for gaming on Linux.

So you're right, it isn't generally true today.

I personally don't use the Linux builds if the Windows version works with Proton, but I do download them for archival. I also don't submit bug reports to devs for Steamplay issues, so that's another factor.

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