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

[tenchrio]

VAC ban (waves) stats are public and quite horrible. Again, instead of providing sources of rampant cheating in Val in places other than their official subreddit, you provided nothing. Which makes me doubt everything you said.

And my rank in CS shouldn't bother you, it's completely beside the point. The fact that you're obsessing over it means you don't even recognize the problem and instead you're ready to insult and belittle me based on my rank as if your global rank (which btw doesn't exist in CS2) proves anything.

Cheaters in CS do not exist for some particular rank, they are everywhere. The only place where they are extremely rare is FaceIt which surprise uses a kernel level solution which obviously works as in 20 years of following the scene I've maybe encountered fewer than a dozen of accusations of people cheating on this platform which proves my initial statement and numbers. On HLTV people complain about cheaters a dozen times daily. In r/GlobalOffensive in comments (such topics are deleted - it's not limited to r/Valorant) you can read about the cheating issue daily at least a dozen of times.

Good bye. Come with solid numbers, or else I have nothing to talk about with you. The case is clear though in Val and FaceIt the cheating issue is mostly a non-issue, in games where a kernel level anticheat is not used, it's rampant. I don't know a single exception unless no one plays the game. Try to convince yourself that VAC "works" despite me having witnessed and played with four egregious cheaters this week alone. All four were kicked. All four had either closed profiles, or profiles with fewer than 100 hours in the game. All four had a single "medal", the "Prime" status. And the other players had on average 8K premier ranking points. Yeah, not a lot. Must be unlucko. Don't forget to use bold and caps.

You literally started by invalidating others arguments by your "Experience", it is beside the point but you decided it has value and now I am calling you out on it, funny how you now cry about it, seems to be your only skill (I also mentioned I got to a 10K rating in premier, still haven't heard your own chief, just that other players had 8K).

Also isn't Vac ban waves about cheaters that are caught? Call me crazy, but pointing to VAC numbers is proof the system is catching cheaters and at least there we get the numbers, Valorant doesn't even give us an API call to even look up the current amount of players, let alone bans. We have a vague official blogpost but all we get there is a graph and again just like with VAC bans these are of course the people that do get caught, interestingly the graph is showing a downwards trend for detected bans, is the number of cheaters decreasing in Valorant? Or are the cheats becoming more undetected? Ah numbers, such lovely things to interpret.

And of course you doubt everything I say, you are biased as hell and misinterpret everything I say, I am not saying that cheating is rampant in Valorant, I am saying it definitely has a presence despite the anticheat while it invites an unnecessary level of risk (I would bold it but it seems to hurt your ego more than it helps you read).
Like my god you always imagine a new argument that was never directly stated before (funny considering you bitch and moan I do it while completely misinterpreting everything by ignoring key words like if and when, but those tend to be complex under the age of 5).

Faceit doesn't disclose player numbers, nor the caught amount of cheaters.
Also why isn't Faceit then the de facto standard of CS2 matchmaking? If the cheater problem is as big as you whine about, yet CS2 keeps topping the steam charts wouldn't people go to Faceit in droves? Also considering you clearly like Valorant so much, how did you experience cheaters on CS2 last week? Don't tell me; your "years of experience" actually started last week. Wait why weren't you playing on Faceit if you say it is that much better? Could it be that your experience is a lie and that you are actually full of shit?

And the argument would still stand, it isn't just about the amount of cheaters, holy shit how hard is this for you to comprehend mister logic 101, it is the security risk that it carries for everyone who doesn't cheat in the first place, why should people take a higher risk with their PC for an undisclosed, unverified reduction in cheaters? I and people with a brain say it is stupid to have such a risk since cheaters clearly get through the anticheats anyway while we barely get a measurable number of effectiveness (who knows if with FaceIt it doesn't just come down to manual bans due to the lower playerbase), you claim they are worth it yet can't actually put any numbers behind it to put it into perspective.

The dangers of a kernel level driver are clear (I mentioned the Genshin Impact one being compromised before and the existence of that one made even less sense, game doesn't even have pvp), the effectiveness of a 24/7 anticheat as a kernel level driver are not. Your argument rests on cheater reduction yet you can't even verify or quantify it. My claim is a kernel level driver is bad idea, you are the one claiming it is worth it, so quantify it, prove it in numbers and not some shitty anecdote that seems to be made up in the first place.

Funny how you didn't mention the ESEA client considering it was also attributed by the community for reducing the amount of cheaters, oh wait right, that one was caught mining Bitcoin without the users consent, yeah probably best to not mention to many alternative anticheats.

I have caps and bold for you since you clearly can't read or reason, doesn't seem to work though, you still don't read it.
Its funny how you don't even mention your Valorant experience, or quantify it versus CS2, you just go "Uh I hAd ChEaTeR iN cS2, lAsT wEeK", cool story bro, how many Valorant games did you play, what game mode, what rank if applicable, how many cheaters did you find in those, how many CS2 games did you play, what game mode, what rank if applicable. And that is of course if the CS2 players were cheating at all and not just smurfs while you get salty for losing the game (and you did provide the evidence of your sodium levels with your last number of posts).

[avis]

I've not noticed a single fact or reference in your post. You doubt me, you try to kinda sorta disagree and then you proceed to admit I've got my arguments including reddit/hltv posts and public VAC bans data. Nice. Meanwhile I have a long list of cheaters in my steam profile, it now has over several dozen convicted people and I just stopped updating it a year ago because it was north worth it. I gave up. Many have decently looking Steam profiles with multiple games, skins and longevity. Doesn't matter.

And 90% of your post is whataboutism (including "Also why isn't Faceit then the de facto standard of CS2 matchmaking?") which I'm too lazy to address. Valve owns CS2, not Faceit. They decide. The vast majority of pro CS players play only FaceIt, FPL, to be precise. There are tons of clips on twitter and youtube of people trying the MM experience of "premier" matchmaking in CS2. Blatant cheaters with over 15K rating playing against the likes of olofmeister, flusha, shox or even s1mple. I'm too lazy to look them up. There were far too many of them.

The kernel anticheat works, period. It's not perfect but it's 1'000 times better than any AI system that Valve employs. People on reddit have been asking Valve to give them one for years now. When CS2 was in beta testing it was often the most upvoted request for the company.

The rest of your very weak attempt of a rebuttal is just that, weak. And you continue to make up "facts" of kernel anticheats making people's systems "insecure" which again you provide zero references of. You're welcome to write a few extra walls of texts with nothing but speculation. I no longer will pretend I read anything authored by you.

In the very post you just quoted I said you'd attempted to doubt or belittle me based on my rank and instead of admitting that maybe this wasn't and couldn't be a rebuttal, you again asked me about that again as if it's fucking relevant to the issue. What if I tell you that I regularly play against FaceIt level 4-5 guys which are far beyond "global elite" you hold so dearly and which according to you is a testament of your word trumping mine? Really? You think so? Will it change anything?

Anyways, use Linux, play CS2 and get rekt. I'm sure you will enjoy aimbotters, spinbotters, wallers and bunnyhoppers. I will continue to enjoy "insecure" kernel level anticheats which give me a peace of mind. Peace out.

[tenchrio]

I've not noticed a single fact or reference in your post. You doubt me, you try to kinda sorta disagree and then you proceed to admit I've got my arguments including reddit/hltv posts and public VAC bans data. Nice. Meanwhile I have a long list of cheaters in my steam profile, it now has over several dozen convicted people and I just stopped updating it a year ago because it was north worth it. I gave up. Many have decently looking Steam profiles with multiple games, skins and longevity. Doesn't matter.

And 90% of your post is whataboutism (including "Also why isn't Faceit then the de facto standard of CS2 matchmaking?") which I'm too lazy to address. Valve owns CS2, not Faceit. They decide. The vast majority of pro CS players play only FaceIt, FPL, to be precise. There are tons of clips on twitter and youtube of people trying the MM experience of "premier" matchmaking in CS2. Blatant cheaters with over 15K rating playing against the likes of olofmeister, flusha, shox or even s1mple. I'm too lazy to look them up. There were far too many of them.

The kernel anticheat works, period. It's not perfect but it's 1'000 times better than any AI system that Valve employs. People on reddit have been asking Valve to give them one for years now. When CS2 was in beta testing it was often the most upvoted request for the company.

The rest of your very weak attempt of a rebuttal is just that, weak. And you continue to make up "facts" of kernel anticheats making people's systems "insecure" which again you provide zero references of. You're welcome to write a few extra walls of texts with nothing but speculation. I no longer will pretend I read anything authored by you.

In the very post you just quoted I said you'd attempted to doubt or belittle me based on my rank and instead of admitting that maybe this wasn't and couldn't be a rebuttal, you again asked me about that again as if it's fucking relevant to the issue. What if I tell you that I regularly play against FaceIt level 4-5 guys which are far beyond "global elite" you hold so dearly and which according to you is a testament of your word trumping mine? Really? You think so? Will it change anything?

Anyways, use Linux, play CS2 and get rekt. I'm sure you will enjoy aimbotters, spinbotters, wallers and bunnyhoppers. I will continue to enjoy "insecure" kernel level anticheats which give me a peace of mind. Peace out.

Please do peace out and never return, we can do without your delusional,idiocy and denial.

You are literally absolutely idiotic and keep changing the argument. I clearly said kernel drivers and you change it to anticheat. I gave you an example of an anticheat with a kernel driver that was compromised (again Genshin Impact) but you clearly cant read for shit and now claim I gave you 0 reference. Is your memory that bad or are you just that stupid?

People can get their kernel anti cheat from Face it so whats the problem then?(also I dont believe you are level 5, another bs claim you made without even a profile link and why werent you on it then? Your story has more plotholes than fanfic does). But Valve is smarter than to risk the pr nightmare if they made one and it would get compromised and Face it might be popular with pros but those are only a fraction of the playerbase, outside of that it seems that most people arent as excited as you claim they would be if they dont make the switch and complain about cheaters.
Just STFU, everything you say is the bias of a child who cares more about cheaters than they do about infosec or programming standards.

[Weasel]

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.

Speculation, but not going to argue about it. The point is, if it was insecure, it would still not be used. Rather pay licensing fees than get compromised and lose everything, derp.

Note that I didn't say Windows is insecure. I know it's shocking, but both can be secure.

[Almindor]

Kernel level anticheats requiring Secure Boot (signed with Microsoft MOK keys) work just fine in Windows and they could also work for MacOS but I've not run this OS enough to say. Both OS'es actually provide extensive protections and guarantees that what you're running is what you're running. Nothing like that is possible in Linux where you're free to circumvent secure boot or even the whole chain of trust by overriding the kernel or libraries responsible for that since nothing but the kernel is signed and you can resign everything with your own MOK key and alter the kernel such a way it will report that you're running a "trusted" MOK.

I'm going to stop you right there son. The secure boot keys you're talking about are already leaked and pretty much widely available. It's one of the reasons why security conscious people remove them from their BIOS and use self-signed secure boot (even tho secure boot itself is a half of a joke but that's a longer discussion).

So having said that the rest of your argument pretty much falls apart. You could argue that less involved script kiddies couldn't go around secure boot even with the keys etc. but then we're talking tournament level cheating in CS etc. so big effort would go into making cheating possible.

In the end, all these anti-cheats are sadly useless. Not because of secure boot, not because of Linux vs Windows. Because they are completely avoidable by sidechannel cheating which is now getting so good it's almost useless to try and stop things "in the loop". With the advent of AI we're going to see a new wave of crazy shit happening on the cheating scene.

[Amarildo]

snip

No anticheat is perfect. As you noted yourself, there are ways of circumventing them, and one of these ways is with cards that read the memory on the PC running the game.
There's also EFI mapping where you masquerade custom Kernel drivers as Windows drivers. Oh, and Riot still haven't found a way of patching AHK (auto-hotkeys) as there are legitimate uses for it.

You can also literally hack on Valorant with a simple raspberryPi computer by simply externally analyzing a small area around the crosshair, then that is inputted into the aimbot that will send signals to a spoofed micro-controller where your mouse is also connected, effectively giving you an aimbot that is impossible for any anticheat to detect.

There are many, many ways of bypassing Kernel-level anticheats. They're not the holy-grail people make them look.

But I think the issue here goes much deeper. People are so obsessed with videogames that they allow rootkits to run on their computers. This is something I'll never do as it can be really dangerous. I could go on about the state of mind that makes people allow this, but unfortunately I don't have the time. All I can say is I'm glad I never install any games with EAC/Battleye even though (AFAIK) these run at userland.

[wangling]

I am online and play dota2 almost every day, but in recent years, I have never received a Steam survey request. Why?

[romainll]

Do you know whether the "change" columns (shown in percent) are actually meant to be percent-points or really percents?


In other words and for clarification where my confusion is:
- Did only Chinese gain users (+7.62%) or Did the region-rate for Chinese change from 25.22% to 32.74% (+7.62 percent-points)?

[avis]

Linux users who don't play online games and don't actually care about security given its laughable state in this OS, advise me what to do. Oh, the irony.

And some dude pretending to be a semi-professional player while not even recognizing cheaters or not even playing the game considering he's boasting about the rank which stopped being relevant over half a year ago continues not to provide any recent relevant data indicating that kernel anticheats somehow make your system wide open for exploitation.

Fortnite alone has likely more players than there are Linux users in the world and somehow we don't get literally thousands of reports of people getting hacked left and right. That strongly indicates someone lives in an alternative reality. And there are lots more games using it including and not limited to:

• Valorant
• Fortnite
• Apex Legends
• PUBG
• Rainbow Six Siege

TLDR:
People who pretend:

• They have an actual OS
• They have a secure OS
• They have a wide variety of closed source software
• They play online multiplayer games

Tell me not to use an actual secure OS which provides enough measures against an horde of cheaters vs zero freaking assurance against such people using Linux. What a disgrace.

And of course no one here will prove their worth despite me offering my laptop and PC to hack secure boot in Windows.

Myths, alternative reality, zealotry and zero facts. This is very reminiscent of a cult/religion.

[Nozo]

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.

Not necessarily, the reason for Linux's success was the same reason that led to the death of the popularity of commercial UNIX systems, apart from being free as in freedom it was also free as in price, UNIX workstations were prohibitively expensive, to the point that the current most expensive Macs and iPhones (which in terms of copyright are also UNIX devices) are cheap in comparison.
While Windows NT was having increasing success in previously UNIX-dominated markets such as workstations, since Windows is not a UNIX/POSIX system, that would have meant having to rewrite and/or port the software they used on UNIX, which would have been very expensive and unfeasible, because well, "UNIX is the HTML5 of operating systems". Windows NT and Server were also always very deficient in other areas such as scalability, even Microsoft itself when they bought Hotmail and tried to migrate their servers from FreeBSD to Windows NT/2000 everything ended horribly wrong.

If Linux had not been free another UNIX-like system would have replaced it, the most likely candidate would have been FreeBSD, even in the hypothetical case if Windows had been legally free, there are many programming stuff that are extremely difficult to do on Windows and are a breeze to do on UNIX and UNIX-like OSes, and this is still true today, and will remain true for the rest of eternity.

Ofc, several of those bots here, who are clearly paid by Microsoft/Riot if not unconditional fanboys, will be in denial of this reality.