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Discussion (144 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
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 support, however this is the first time I head a developer actively turning it off.
I think it speaks volumes of their intent that the game is to be "fully removed from the Linux platform", and they won't offer the single player experience or non competitive experience for Linux based customers.
On top of that it seems to me they tried sneaking this statement in an announcement titled "Ranked FAQ". This shows they have no respect for their customers.
https://dev.epicgames.com/docs/epic-online-services/platform...
Removing the single player mode from Linux, however, suggests that they’re doing this because any platform without multiplayer is worthless to them, which suggests there must be a ‘skin shop’ in this game that is viewed as the primary revenue generator. That decision is extremely disrespectful — but it’s the same disrespect they might show by not selling the single player game in countries that disallowed predatory loot boxes, for example. I wholeheartedly support naming and shaming that disrespect; here, they’ve mixed it with complaints about cheating to (largely successfully) disguise a cost-benefit analysis as out of their control due to Linux.
Even if it did, you wouldn't stop DMA cheaters from hacking the game. This is the slippery slope we see on Windows with Ring 0 anticheat being defeated with spoofed PCI hardware.
I know that Nvidia’s been implementing attestation for the PCI links to AI GPUs recently, and iirc USB has supported it for a while now (though I’m not sure whether USB-IF has formalized it). I would be shocked if there isn’t already a DDR standard for same coming up in 6 or 7. It’ll take a while to for all this reach the consumer market but the alternative is, as you correctly observe, the gradual decline of trustworthiness of not only attested Win11 gaming PCs but also gaming consoles — but emptying the cesspool of the software cheaters in the meantime remains a sensible step to take.
See also:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6258448 (2012)
https://memlab.ece.gatech.edu/papers/DSN_2023_2.pdf (2023)
https://pcisig.com/blog/ide-and-tdisp-overview-pcie%C2%AE-te... (2025)
https://docs.trustauthority.intel.com/main/articles/articles... (2026)
one thing is installing some software on your puter, a whole other is putting a pcie card in. Go eat some toe jam
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.
Assuming secure boot, there’s another realistic way, which is to use vendor-signed readonly Linux OS images — not just kernels — that disallow process memory access to root, come with signed kernel drivers, and offer secure attestation support chained to secure boot. Steam Linux and Bazzite could both implement this easily; the former has a fixed hardware target list and the latter is already an ‘all in one’ solution. Since Linux users are generally competent at dual-booting, one would simply dual-boot into the sealed image to play PvP multiplayer games, no eBPF development or maintenance of anti-cheat required. Embark is within their rights to evaluate the workload of supporting DIY unsigned Linux instances through eBPF but doing so would create a viable competitor to an attestation-derived Valve Anti-Cheat for Steam Linux, and so likely inspire the giant in the room to step up and obsolete it.
Ubisoft respected my wishes to not play their shitty games by not even supporting my OS of choice.
Apex is another game that also disabled it.
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.
So in order to store or read data they would need consent. But consent requirements come from GDPR and it's unlikely that this type of consent would be "freely given" given the impact of refusal.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/304390/FOR_HONOR/
https://www.ubisoft.com/en-us/help/for-honor/article/system-...
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 to avoid all ubisoft games like the plague)
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 (previously I did my desktop gaming in a windows VM) and the feeling of relief is almost tangible. Windows 11 is _so fucking bad_.
I understand that there may be some semi-legitimate arguments around anticheat, but a) not my problem, and b) back in the day we dealt with cheaters by having a persistent dedicated server community with admins ready to kick or ban. The publishers took that away from us.
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.
If your point is simply that the publishers think this is a good business decision for them, that's obvious, because they're a business and they aren't going to make decisions they think are bad. But I am not sure how your muddled logic about feasibility feeds into that point.
They're playing with that with the Xbox Full Screen Experience on ROG Xbox Ally, but it's still running Windows 11 underneath. I just want the Xbox.
For anything not gaming related, I have Linux or MacOS.
Using a Windows 11 machine stirs up some old trauma I try to forget.
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 when playing CS I had framerate bugs, text would not render properly (even after messing around with it for some days), and mouse input was.. not ideal. It's come a long way since the days of WINE.
FWIW, I moved from Debian to "Nobara Linux" for this. Mostly because I was in the mood for some distro hopping as well. Highly recommend the experience. (https://nobaraproject.org/). It was a smooth experience from the start, no issues installing it, drivers worked out-of-the-box, audio settings all worked fine, and Steam was pre-installed as well. Super cool.
Would not move back to Windows gaming for Ubisoft games lol.
Definitely lowers the barrier of entry for someone entirely new to Linux as well.
[1] https://www.ign.com/articles/ubisoft-exec-says-gamers-need-t...
Nothing makes more comfortable than not playing Ubisoft games.
'The client cannot be trusted' applies to simple HTTP exchanges as well as to game state.
Of course, if the server has to track and validate everything, it would cost more to operate game servers....
This is "It works better in the app" applied to gaming services.
However, from a consumer perspective, this is incredibly frustrating. The average person does not think of "linux vs. windows". They just bought the steam deck and when they bought For Honor it was sold on that "platform". Again, it's hard to blame Ubisoft for this conundrum since they were never necessarily trying to be steam deck compliant to begin with, but it definitely feels wrong to take the game away from a player in this perspective.
All that being said, historically across many games such as Rust, many are quick to blame linux for cheating, but pragmatically banning linux has yet to measurably reduce the amount of cheating that players report experiencing, so I don't agree with the decision at all. It's a footgun disguised as a band aid
I agree that it's not on them to maintain it, but that's different from intentionally breaking it.
Honestly Valve should have a stricter warning if a game is Windows only
Even sending metadata so the client can use local sprites to render the enemy is hackable, if the end-user knows the coordinates where to render the enemy, it can immediately tell the server that "user aimed at $COORDS and pulled the trigger"...
Easy Anti cheat works as a software but doesn't work as an anti cheat system.
Looking at the Steam page for this game, there's a "year 10 roadmap" post.
I remember in the old days some games had optional anticheat and there were servers with and without it.
Really, linux is meant to give you control over the software that runs in your computer. Anti-cheat is inherently about limiting what you can run on your computer. Windows is much more aimed at allowing you opt in to hard limitations.
you're all the worse.
I think it's already more than 0,1% in most popular games online, but I am assuming it would be just unplayable without anticheat.
People are so brain washed that it is essential that here we are, sad companies won't take the option you giving them root access on linux too!
a much better solution would be absolutely no root kit, but players picking "never play with this player gain". done. boardgame.com does this and it is very much perfect and flawless.
You either put some trust into the systems made by other people, or you don't touch computers at all.
different goals, different people involved, different scope of access, different amount of review, different amount of use = different levels of trust
it's either completely and honestly someone not technical missing the point entirely, or more likely trolling.
Ditched them once they required you to use their own launcher. Years before completely replacing Windows with Linux.
Ubisoft is dead to me so why should I retain useless knowledge?
Nevermind, wrong company.