Gaben be praised!
But that's fine, even preferable? I love it when my interests and someone else's interests naturally align themselves.
I'm guessing it's because Linux constantly breaks ABI for out-of-tree kernel modules. And because every version of a distro can have a different kernel it's a nightmare of a support matrix.
That and Secure Boot establishing a chain of trust. Valorant requires Secure Boot and TPM 2.0 which means users can't modify the kernel driver. I'm not sure if Valorant wants to distribute their own Secure Boot keys and sign all the distro kernels + their module.
Sure, the Linux kernel will let you load any unsigned kernel modules you want...but cheating is still possible (and happens) on Windows, so...
(Granted, trying to stop someone from running code on their own computer is a losing battle/stupid idea from the get-go)
the problem is anti cheat vendors see linux as a small market so its not worth the effort to make it work. maybe valve can help by giving display priority to games that support linux and a warning banner for those that dont. or team up with epic games but gaben would probably have to invite tim sweeney to valve hq and personally explain it all.
Meanwhile, kernel level anti cheats live their full life on the CPU and the logic is itself the software driver. Hacking the software driver therefore gives you actual direct control of the anticheat behavior and functionality itself.
freedom in this scenario is more akin to "you are free to choose" above "you should pick one of the free choices".
some people will decide for paid products and some people will consume closed source "evil corporation" software.
... while it IS "anti ethical" to some of its founders, it should be an individual choice of each user, after all its my machine, and i don’t have to care about what Stallman/whatever says I should or shouldn’t do with my stuff, the same way they have their right to tell me to go fuck myself for my choices.
I just fear that HDCP is a Trojan Horse. It’s used to protect DRM content since its inception, but the powers that be can use it to control what you see on your screen. Feels like it will be abused given enough time.
yep.
overall what I expect to happen in a few years:
* more people get more fed up with microsoft + gaming on linux gets more popular * some few distros will be very oriented for closed source drm heavy software.
in this scenario the regular Debian "i wont install binary blobs on my machine" folks wont get affected, but certainly there will be "blackbox linux" distros with the "i have no idea what i am running" binary blobs kind of environment.
If the word is: "hey, you need this distro to play netflix drm content at 4k" a lot of people would pick that over the regular "opener source" stuff.
if it were viable to have some sort of "witchcraft, undecipherable, untamperable" linux pseudo variant that allows for intrusive anti cheat software for the games that dont support regular linux, we would be there already. I know I would be using that for being the "lesser crap than windows 11" that lets me play my comercial multiplayer games.
on the other side, if the day comes that "Linux from now onwards officially forces HDCP" the regular purist would ignore that without many problems... thanks to open source! and we would probably call this fork something else.
... therefore maybe this trojan horse is sign of the end, but mostly as the end of the "main brand name" and not of its forks.
Related discussion on this and additional DSC support then: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48105874