The wording in the tweet in the article is a little less bombastic. He’s concerned about maintaining anti-cheat for custom kernels and other Linux-exclusive issues at the scale that Fortnite runs at. Given how large the audience for that game is and the age range (which has a lot more time to dedicate) I can see how that would be a costly endeavor and look at TF2 right now as an example of what happens if you fail to do so. Combine that with the much smaller footprint of the Linux base (which is changing!) and thus, less incentive to tackle any of that in the first place.
Maybe I’m just trying to not read ill intent, but I see “Linux gamers are a hard audience to serve” as “You guys use an OS focused on freedom and customization, which means it’s literally harder to serve you all effectively” and not as “Linux gamers are mean”.
I don’t think that the bots problem in tf2 is because of linux, I think that valve just doesn’t care about tf2 enough to fix it
Oh, no, I wasn’t tying that to Linux. It’s just an example of how you can generate a very negative situation for your game if you do not maintain anticheat to a quality expectation.
#fixtf2
Yeah but they haven’t bothered making their store run natively on linux.
They deliberately DROPPED linux support for rocket league when they bought it. Like, immediately. It’s just a hate-on for Linux.
Yep and that’s a separate issue I think you would be perfectly entitled to be upset about. I’m just thinking through serving something as complex as anticheat to an audience the size of Fortnite’s for the potential gain of a small Linux footprint (for now). Not many businesses would jump for that.
Or ya know, the steam deck is on a platform they are trying to take over by throwing money at their store. Of course they aren’t going to make it easy for kids to play on deck.
I think ‘we won’t serve you cause we can’t rootkit your device’ also rubs some linux people wrong, but to each their own ig
Custom kernels aren’t commonly used, it’s a niche within a niche. They literally don’t need to “tackle” anything here, they can just support the Steam Deck and call it a day.
The biggest legitimate concern here is cheating, since cheaters could conceivably customize their kernel to bypass whatever EAC does. That’s a theoretical attack only, and there are plenty more theoretical attacks that aren’t unique to Linux.
It’s not an issue of compatibility, but Tim thinking he owns your computer. I don’t want any software that needs to control my computer; if it can’t run in a sandbox, I don’t want it. I understand him worrying about a base level of compatibility, but I don’t have any sympathy for the “but Linux is so diverse” argument, officially support one and the rest will figure it out.
