Yeah but that doesn't count tbh, if the dev has to give the okay we lose a ton of games, and that isn't what I'm looking for, the dev shouldn't be able to know it isn't running on windows
No, forget anticheat games. It's not possible to create a "fake" rootkit. If it was possible, they would have done it for Windows too, and it would defeat the purpose of anti-cheat. So, just don't run these games. They don't worth your security.
Unlikely; ultimately wine can run userspace anti-cheat but not kernel level anti-cheat, not by itself, is this were to happen it would take a few changes on how we do things
Ive seen it suggested from others/content-creators that valve or some other finacially involved company should make their own distro or simply a kernel that would have built in killswitch that flags the user when they fail required modification checks and prevents online play.
What really needs to happen is the eventual mass exodus from windows due to its continued enshitification. The increase in linux users + any notable figures like pro gamers or content creators that switch over to linux will force game developers financially to open anticheat to linux users and make a blanket solution.
If it could the anti-cheat system wouldn't be worth using. Being able to "trick" the anti-cheat system into thinking something else is going on than actually happens is the same an actual "cheat" would do. That's why kernel level anti-cheat system go though a lot of trouble to detect any kind of virtualization or similar tricks...the moment you could trick them into accepting a fake kernel is also the moment that fake kernel can pretend the fake input it generates actually comes from a real mouse or the checksum of that openGL/vulkan library is exactly the one expected and not the one of some altered libraries that "accidentally" forget to not render stuff behind walls...
It's also something that needs to be kept in mind when talking about "Companies can just enable the linux support in their anti-cheat systems but they don't." While this is true of course it also means the kernel-level anti-cheat systems are bared from kernel-access and degraded to user-space only. And as people have access to the source-code of the linux kernel nothing is stopping anyone from just modifying the kernel to...give more "favorable results" while playing the game. Of course the linux playerbase it too tiny to really offer a market for such cheats...but it's not completely unreasonable to not want to erode the capabilities of your anti-cheat system (That is of course if you believe they work in the first place...but that's a different discussion).
Sounds like a terrible idea; this would only further deteriorate the trust some companies have in Linux with anti-cheat, that would be terrible for the adoption
Yes, we are waiting for the CrowdStrike aha moment where the industry learns the hard way that anticheat with root privileges was a dangerous idea not worth the risks.
Anti cheat software tries to find cheats running on the computer, and in order to that, so called kernel-level anticheat hooks into NT (Windows kernel) internals, and runs at the highest possible privilege level. It has to do that so it can monitor everything going on in the system. If it didn't do that, the cheat could just hide from the anticheat software by running with superior privileges.
Wine does not implement undocumented/internal parts of NT, and neither does it run at an elevated privilege level. It also cannot realistically implement any and all possible NT kernel internals, and it cannot possibly hide the fact that it's actually wine, and not real Windows, from any program that really wants to figure this out.
If wine tried to implement a specific workaround for a specific anti-cheat software/version, in order to it trick into thinking it's running on a real Windows system with elevated privileges, the anti-cheat vendor would likely interpret this as a kind of deception, and they could easily update their software to detect this situation.
Theoretically, anti-cheat vendors could do kernel-level anticheat for the Linux kernel specifically if the game runs on Linux, but this has problems: First of all a general backlash and complete lack of cooperation from the Linux community (btw, Microsoft isn't too happy about them doing this on Windows either, and they might at some point do something about this, since it's bad for security and stability). Also, Linux kernel internals aren't at all stable, and so just practically you cannot hook into the Linux kernel nearly as easily as you can into NT.
Some anti-cheat vendors do support Linux though, but only optionally if the game dev allows that. In practice, this just means many checks will just be disabled on Linux, which is presumably why many games do not enable the Linux support.
tl;dr: No. Only the anti-cheat vendor / game dev can realistically fix the situation, and they may not want to because it'll be worse at actually detecting cheats on Linux in practice.
IIRC Most major anti-cheat platforms not using kernel -level support linux these days. The SteamDeck forced their hand.
The problem is the developers. They have the ability to specifically block Linux and that's only going to change once enough people use it. As for kernel level that's an entirely different can of worms and I'm fine just not playing those games.
I hope not. I hope it never does. Windows users are weird enough not giving a shit about installing rootkits on their computer. We don't want this in Linux. What computer is worth compromising just for some game to determine whether or not you're cheating at it?
I wonder if immutable systems could negate the need for kernel anti cheat. If the game can ensure the current kernel and image is one from a list of acceptable ones, it doesn't need to kernel anti cheat. They could do this by comparing the checksum or something.
No idea why you've been down voted. If someone simply must play kernel level anti-cheat games, the best way to do it is on Windows. Developers have made it very clear they do not trust Wine/Proton/Linux and that are market share is simply too small to care.