Switching to linux had me cold turkey league of legends im a healthier happier person now.
the real cold turkey was Riot killing linux support last year. Seems like there wasn’t enough linux players at the time for them to walk back that decision.
Funniest thing.: the Mac client also doesn’t support Kernel anti cheat, but it still works. Fuck riot, I’m glad I ditched it.
I think this is a higher percentage than Windows 11 if you include 16-bit ones from the 90s and early 2000s. (What was wrong with NTVDM64, anyway?)
Unfortunately those pesky live service games that have the most player counts are disproportionately represented in that 10%.
Which I’m sure is much higher than windows games working on windows. Proton is awesome for old games.
The only game I am not able to make it work on Linux is “The Sims 4”. After installing it on Steam, when clicking on Play, it runs the EA app in the background and tries to start the game, but it doesn’t load. Any suggestion?
Try the GE version of Proton, it’s usually more curring edge.
Mayb this can help: https://www.protondb.com/app/1222670
Thank you so much, it worked installing EA app on Lutris and using ProtonGE 10.25
Happy that it worked! GE Proton is usually more cutting edge, and it’s my default. I fall back to regular one if I have problems, but it’s rare.
Unfortunately the 10% that don’t include the biggest, most played games in the world.
This. Plus anti-cheat is still a removed on Linux.
Anticheat works fine. Just not the kernel level nasty ones. But that’s a good thing.
But that’s a good thing.
If you don’t want to be able to play the biggest games released, I guess…
You’re looking at it wrong. They need to not invade our kernel.
For this type of anti-cheat yes, they do.
You can choose not to let them, it just means you can’t play the games. Do you believe they’re installing malicious code or something in the anti-cheat?
Exactly. This is not a type I need. My kernel does not need to be invaded. It’s literally enabling spyware and you’d never know it.
Do I believe it? I don’t know. But it’s possible and I’d never know, so fuck that.
- ESEA Bitcoin miner incident (2013) In April 2013 ESEA (a third-party matchmaking + anti-cheat service) had a built-in bitcoin-miner component in their client. It was discovered by users in May. � XDA Developers +1 Because the ESEA client ran with high privileges (as a driver/anti-cheat style client), the mining component was harder to detect and harder to remove compared to normal user-mode software. � XDA Developers The company settled for a $1 M payout. � Lesson: Granting deep OS access to a client means if it goes rogue (or is malicious) you get real damage (mining, rootkit-like behaviour, etc). XDA Developers
- Riot Vanguard (for VALORANT) and related complaints Vanguard is the kernel-level anti-cheat used by Riot Games in VALORANT. � Wikipedia +1 It has drawn criticism for its always-running behaviour (some users report it loads at boot even before the game). � Gist +1 Some users report system instability (blue screens) after installation. � Lesson: Even if the anti-cheat isn’t malicious per se, because it’s so deep, any defect or compatibility issue can cause system-wide pain (crashes, instability). XDA Developers
- Theoretical/privacy risk: drivers acting like rootkits Academic work (“If It Looks Like a Rootkit…”) analyses KLAC and finds that some solutions behave very similarly to rootkits: intercepting kernel calls, hiding modules, monitoring broad system activity. � arXiv Articles note that allowing game companies to insert drivers at boot time that monitor “outside the game” sets a “potentially dangerous precedent”. � Lesson: Even when everything is “legal”, the architectural model has intrinsic risk: trusted code has extremely high privileges; if trust is misplaced (malicious dev, insider threat, compromise) you have huge exposure. How-To Geek
- Example of “residual services” / bad uninstall behaviour A Steam forum post (for game “Delta Force (2025 video game)”) reported that the anti-cheat driver “ACE-BASE / AntiCheatExpert” remained active even after game uninstall, caused conflicts, etc. � Lesson: When kernel-level drivers aren’t cleanly managed/uninstalled, they can linger as “shadow” privileged components, increasing risk surface. Steam Community
- Corporate/State concerns & data-privacy An article points out that KLAC by its nature has full system visibility (“what this means is that this type of spyware can exfiltrate sensitive information…”) and calls out potential misuse—especially worrying when combined with acquisitions or state-influence (e.g., the purchase of a KLAC-provider by a sovereign entity). � Lesson: Beyond just “can it crash my PC”, there’s question of what else the driver could observe (system activity, other processes, telemetry) and whether user has meaningful control.
That’s a lot of “it possibly could, but it never has happened with huge reputable billion dollar companies”. Also seems like an AI generated list, or copied from Wikipedia? If that’s the best you can find, yeah there’s no issue.
No one should be giving some random anti-cheat program made by who knows who kennel level access, but one by EA? Fine. EA aren’t in the business of getting bankrupted by installing rootkit malware with their video game anti-cheat.
Calling anti-cheat “spyware” is dumb.
Like Elden ring and nightreign? Hugely successful games. Play them all the time in Linux.
Hows battlefield 6 going on linux? Fortnite? Black Ops 6? Warzone? PUBG? Apex Legends? GTA 5 / GTA Online?
I don’t play any of those.
My point is, there’s loads of great popular multiplayer games that don’t use garbage kernel level anticheat.
But Elden Ring and Elden Ring Nightreign are not multiplayer games…?
You can also add many more of the top most popular multiplayer games to my list, I just listed a few of the biggest. You won’t be playing GTA6, which is likely to be the biggest game of all time, on Linux. Black Ops 7, the biggest release of this year, won’t be on Linux.
You obviously know nothing about these two games lol. Yes they are multiplayer. Nightreign is also designed to primarily be played 3 players online at a time.
Co-op, duels, and “invasions” lol. Not what we’re talking about here. Elden ring is a single player game for all that any one cares or knows.
We’re definitely not talking about co-op when anyone says multiplayer.
You need to learn the definition of “multi”, then.
Good, but native would be better. At least they can’t kill Linux the way they did os/2
Ummmm sure?
I don’t want to start that extremely old flame war of native VS jit code but…
Proton is not an emulation, it is a translation to native code, and while it has some drawbacks (more memory usage, more time at start up to compile things) it can unlocks a lot of potential when the hw support new capabilities, this is the reason that some dx10 games run faster on Linux…
I might be wrong, but I don’t think proton is either? It’s running x86 instructions either way, wine just provides a way to load it from the windows executable and library formats, and together with proton they provide implementations of windows libraries for those executables to use.
I guess most of the process is just using a wrapper to translate the call to a Windows library to the equivalent call to a Linux library.
I think most of the work is in the fact that there often isn’t an “equivalent call”, and it can be quite a lot of code to make it work. One funny thing is the whole esync-fsync-ntsync issue, where synchronization is done differently on Linux and on windows, and translating it was a big performance hit, and difficult to do accurately. If I understood correctly, esync, fsync and ntsync were a series of kernel patches implementing additional synchronization code in the kernel, with ntsync actually replicating the windows style.
