Steam's February Survey: AMD CPUs & GPUs Continue To Dominate For Linux Gamers

[Weasel]

Anticheat for Linux cannot work or exist period. The architecture is far too open for meddling.

You misspelled malware.

[Weasel]

Have you ever run or played CSGO/CS2/Valorant/Apex Legends/Dota/PubG/CoD/etc.? What about grinding any of them for a few thousand hours? I've done that. I have a ton of experience with cheaters. What about you? A Linux fan who probably plays 15 years old single player games on his ingrated GPU. The hell are you talking about then? What makes you believe your opinion is even remotely true/relevant/based?

Look who's talking. You're beyond delusional or lying if you think any of those cheaters were using Linux. So basically you shot yourself in the foot, I guess.

[Weasel]

Wake me up when Linux has:

• Anything close to Windows ACLs
• Anything close to HVCI
• Anything close to a fully isolated UAC password prompt
• Anything close to software security policies (yeah, there's SeLinux and AppArmor both of which are black magic for users)
• Anything close to full system integrity verification including a signed bootloader and signed userspace
• Central authority to sign software and third party drivers - in Linux you wanna use third-party kernel drivers? Goodbye Secure Boot unless you wanna tinker with your own MOK certificates which almost no one does, given how much hassle it is.

Security through obscurity is solely in in the Linux court. You run Linux and you have no clue whether you've been compromised or not. None. There's no chain of trust. Some distros have been dabbling with reproducible builds but that's nothing unless you have an easy way to verify your system integrity against what's being distributed.

I can give you my laptop and my PC right away and you're welcome to compromise them using an EFI "golden key" or whatever gives you. I dare you.

I also dare you to provide examples of systems being compromised via TPM.

Ah, never mind, you've got nothing just "I've heard Windows in "insecure", this and that, and I believe Linux is secure despite not even coming close to what Windows/Android/iOS/MacOS provide".

I've not heard, I have facts on my side and they are not pretty.

Why is Linux the most popular on servers then and completely dominates the cloud, if it's so insecure, huh?

Since this topic is about anti cheat I will make it as simple as possible.

Anti cheats and Microsoft's protections aren't there to protect you from threats. It's to protect Microsoft from you instead. And preventing you from having control over your computer so they can control you like an obedient puppet.

[sophisticles]

Genuine question why are you on a forum about FOSS news if you don't like Linux lol

There are so many things wrong with your question and to see why change your question to a political question:

"Why are you on a forum about Candidate X news if you don't like politics"?

See?

Implicit in your question is that the only people who are allowed to share an opinion are those that like everything about Linux.

Is that your stance?

[sophisticles]

If an obscurity is the main reason for "better security", then a solution is pretty much garbage. Blaming openness for the "worse security" is an absurd indefensible position, but you like these for attention (during the right moon phase).

Security starts and ends with obscurity, period.

Everything you do in your life, including posting on this forum, involves protecting yourself by employing obscurity.

I'll prove.

What's your real name?

What's your address?

What's your driver's license number?

What's your social security number?

What bank(s) do you use?

What are the account numbers?

In fact, when so-called hackivists want to harass someone or hurt them what do they do? They dox them, which means they put their confidential information on the internet.

Linux security is a myth.

[sophisticles]

Why is Linux the most popular on servers then and completely dominates the cloud, if it's so insecure, huh?

Linux's popularity stems from the fact that it is legally free and under most circumstances a user does not need to pay the per seat or per core licensing fees associated with proprietary solutions.

If Windows were legally free I don't think Linux would have every gained a foothold.

[tenchrio]

Only one of us frequents CS2 and Val communities and only one of us knows how rampant the cheater issue is in CS2 and how it's basically a non-issue in Val.

One features no anticheat (VAC works server side), the other one requires an evil kernel anticheat which has so far done nothing to anyone despite being slandered from all orifices on the internet.

So you look for other people bitching and moaning about cheaters like you in the same game instead of actually getting good and now believe that confirmation bias somehow validates your point? My guy you are chugging the cool aid.

Also have you actually been on the Valorant subreddit? Aside from the fact that it was originally accused of banning and shutting down any topics critical of Vanguard (back when it was even more prone of endangering your PC), it literally has a rule in place that you can't post hackusations unless they are coming from a journalistic source, in other words, users cannot post clips like the CSGO subreddit even if the enemy is blatantly cheating (Valorant also still doesn't have a replay system like CSGO/CS2, you better be sacrificing FPS and disk space to record every second to catch cheaters). And even still there have been a couple of posts on there complaining about an increase in cheaters in the last month (man the things you can find if you actively look for them). And that is the most popular Valorant forum as Riot doesn't even offer an official one, meaning if you get hackers in Valorant, you barely get to vent let alone that it is visible in the community how much of a problem it really is.

VAC works client side, VACNET works serverside, CS2 has both, stop pulling shit out of your ass.

The issue isn't that Vanguard currently has exploits, it is when one is found it endangers a PC for what? To give idiots like you a false sense of security that your game will be cheater free despite it being blatantly obvious from the tournament scene of that not being the case (you would think they would try even harder there)?
Apple fanboys have the same demented reasoning like you that a closed obscure system is somehow safer, and just recently we had the wonderful Pegasus 0-click iMessage exploit proving that point oh so wrong with nothing but locally pre-installed iOS goodness. And that is one of many cases proving that obscurity does not equal security (not to mention last year when the source code for LoL and TFT ended up on the black market, let's hope the security of the dev team for Vanguard is better).

[fluke]

I often wonder why China uses Windows given the animosity between USA and China.

[M.Bahr]

Wake me up when Linux has:

• Anything close to Windows ACLs
• Anything close to HVCI
• Anything close to a fully isolated UAC password prompt
• Anything close to software security policies (yeah, there's SeLinux and AppArmor both of which are black magic for users)
• Anything close to full system integrity verification including a signed bootloader and signed userspace
• Central authority to sign software and third party drivers - in Linux you wanna use third-party kernel drivers? Goodbye Secure Boot unless you wanna tinker with your own MOK certificates which almost no one does, given how much hassle it is.

Security through obscurity is solely in in the Linux court. You run Linux and you have no clue whether you've been compromised or not. None. There's no chain of trust. Some distros have been dabbling with reproducible builds but that's nothing unless you have an easy way to verify your system integrity against what's being distributed.

I can give you my laptop and my PC right away and you're welcome to compromise them using an EFI "golden key" or whatever gives you. I dare you.

I also dare you to provide examples of systems being compromised via TPM.

Ah, never mind, you've got nothing just "I've heard Windows in "insecure", this and that, and I believe Linux is secure despite not even coming close to what Windows/Android/iOS/MacOS provide".

I've not heard, I have facts on my side and they are not pretty.

avis I am new to phoronix but i have already read some of your comments. And to be honest your reply fits exactly some other claims of yours. I don't know why your agenda seems to be a smear campaign against Linux here in this place of all places.

There is so much wrong in your answer that i don't know where to begin with. There are even some logical fallacies in there. Let's take for example SELinux and AppArmor. Fact is Linux users don't have to know how it works. It works anyway. If the lack of knowledge about how a security measurement works was an argument what can i say then about even more clueless windows users?

I've already learned my lesson from a discussion with some other fanatic for proprietary code here in phoronix. So i am not going to repeat my mistake by having another fruitless discussion. I just hope that you don't really believe your own claims about an alleged superiority of windows on security. Let me assure you on the grounds of my education in IT for more than 30 years that no experienced and reasonable administrator who is responsible for big and critical systems would ever put windows on a server. Just imagine Windows on one of the major Internet exchange points of the world. There is an extremely high probability that this would end in a catastrophe of immense proportions. By the way even Microsoft themselves don't seem to trust using windows for their critical azure services but use Linux instead.

As for the actual discussion on anti-cheat it looks like I was right in my assessment. There already seem to be some AI cheat devices, even a monitor with integrated AI that helps cheaters in online games. I therefore fully stand by my previous comment.

[chithanh]

Anticheat for Linux cannot work or exist period. The architecture is far too open for meddling.

Don't be so sure of that. When LSM were introduced, the grsecurity folks warned that it would become the interface for kernel-level rootkits, and anticheat is only a special kind of rootkit. Of course the warnings were ignored because they came from grsecurity. Assuming the GPL situation can be sorted out, then that is where one can expect kernel-level anticheat to appear.

Wake me up when Linux has:

• Central authority to sign software and third party drivers - in Linux you wanna use third-party kernel drivers? Goodbye Secure Boot unless you wanna tinker with your own MOK certificates which almost no one does, given how much hassle it is.

No, sorry but you are ignorant about how modern Linux distros work. Did you ever attempt to install a package containing a 3rd party kernel module on Ubuntu with secure boot enabled? What will happen is that the package manager will generate the certificate for signing and install it into the keystore automatically for the user. No tinkering required. Secure boot remains enabled. The only interaction needed is a confirmation screen on next boot.

I've not heard, I have f̶a̶c̶t̶s TFMA on my side and they are not pretty.

FTFY.

Linux's popularity stems from the fact that it is legally free and under most circumstances a user does not need to pay the per seat or per core licensing fees associated with proprietary solutions.

If Windows were legally free I don't think Linux would have every gained a foothold.

You are conflating cause and effect, as wells "free as in beer" with "free as in speech". Proprietary does not mean that you have to pay, and let's see what happens in market segments where Windows is actually free:

Microsoft since more than a decade gives away Windows licenses to OEMs for free on devices with 9" or below screen size, in reaction to those devices shipping less often with Windows. It didn't help however: Android now thoroughly dominates the mobile segment with iOS a distant second, and in handheld gaming the Steam Deck sells more than all Windows gaming handhelds combined.

Security starts and ends with obscurity, period.

That is either low-effort trolling, or a severe case of si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses. Security by obscurity runs afoul of Kerckhoff's principle that a system's security does not change even if everything besides the private encryption key becomes publicly known. It has nothing to do with making data public.

I often wonder why China uses Windows given the animosity between USA and China.

China is locked into Microsoft products like many others worldwide. They are trying to get away from it, but that is a slow process. One part is that they now sell domestic Linux distributions which come with vendor support, and which run on China-designed CPUs like Loongson.