Godort

I’m not sure this will be an issue.

When a piece of software is checking for chain of trust, it’s done primarily for security or DRM reasons. The benefits of verifying this chain of trust would make it a little harder for cheaters to inject code and it would be an extra hurdle for pirates to overcome, but the cost is that everyone that bought your game with the intent of playing it on Linux now has absolutely no way to make that happen. I’m not sure the loss in ~4% of your sales would be worth the benefit.

I believe that’s just fear-mongering. This has been a thing that Microsoft has wanted to do for a while, largely because having 3rd party code with direct kernel access is a huge problem in terms of stability and security unless you can be sure you know what all that code is doing.

They tried to do this in the past, arguing that anything that wanted kernel-level access had to Windows API calls instead, however Windows Defender which was bundled with the OS was exempt from this restriction. The EU argued that it gave Microsoft a competitive advantage in the AV space and mandated that if they wanted to do this, they had to follow their own rules which MS was not willing to do.

Instead, Microsoft dictated that any code that was going to run in the kernel had to be submitted to Microsoft for review, who would then approve or deny the code for use. The problem with this method is that it’s slow, so any AV that wanted to update their engine had to go through a code review process every time. Crowdstrike (and likely every other AV provider) got around this by having a component of their software with kernel-access that could read in data dynamically. This is what caused that worldwide BSOD problem a couple years back. The Crowdstrike component with kernel access loaded in a bad update that was not properly reviewed and it broke every system with the AV installed.

Overall, this change is a good thing and will force software vendors to actually operate securely rather than just asking for ring 0 access when they don’t need it. As always, if you’re worried about the changes MS is making, Linux is available and getting better day by day.

What if the play field is the whole leg and it’s O’s turn currently?

Edit: Then X wins regardless and I’m a dummy

Rightsholders have to compete with pirates, but the inverse is true too.

Pirates typically win on price, but if they deliver a sub-par product, or make it more inconvenient to access, then it makes sense to go through official channels instead.

Is it possible to have kernel-level anti-cheat in Linux?

Yes, Absolutely. But, people would throw a fit. There is probably no way to opensource it without also making it easier to bypass. There would be a concerted effort to reverse engineer it and remove it from the system while maintaining functionality

Maintainers of anti-cheat software are not volunteers. If there was an order from management to port the system to Linux, it would happen. It’s just that with the Linux userbase as small as it is, it’s simply not profitable to cater to them.

I think that if it ever happens, there will be a influx of people moving to linux, or abandoning their duelboots

I fully disagree. The thing keeping regular people away from Linux as an OS is not that they can’t play some online game with Anti-cheat.

Linux is in a weird place right now. It’s actually a perfect fit for non-technical users that use their computers for email, web browsing, and Netflix, but those users don’t know what an operating system is, let alone that there are options. More technical users tend to require more specialized applications, and if there isn’t a native linux port available, you have to do some research for alternatives, or to find a way to run it in wine.

Windows is shitty, but it’s comfortable. And I know that it will run any software I throw at it with basically no research or troubleshooting.

It’s been like 20 years since I’ve done math like this. Can someone smarter than me remind me why this is wrong?