The issue has never been that games can’t run on Linux. It has always been a simple question of “will the games I want to play run?” More than ever, that answer is yes, but if your favorite game doesn’t, or if you never want to worry about “will this upcoming (online) game let me play on Linux?” then you use Windows by default.
Like, I love y’all, but the Linux gaming community on Lemmy is kinda insufferable with the straw-man “people think games can’t run on Linux” argument. That’s just not the issue
That’s why they specified online, because the cancer that is Easy-Anti Cheat has a teeny tiny checkbox saying “allow linux users” that is rarely if ever checked.
dunno, if we’re talking about easy anti-cheat, i’ve played insurgency: sandstorm, war thunder and hunt: showdown. Not a lot of games, but none of them had any issues
Plenty of games do check it! Which is why it’s excessively frustrating when other games consciously choose not to. There were a few hiccups initially but now as far as I’m aware it’s literally just the checkbox.
I really hate this "it’s just a checkbox* narrative. It’s bullshit. EAC functions very differently on Linux and it is ridiculous to assume that “it says EAC is on” = “game is secure”
Enabling Linux support does inherently allow more attack vectors that need to be secured that don’t need to be if it’s windows only. Linux works against these kinds of anticheats, as they’re working to get the most information out of the system as possible to prevent 3rd party programs from being run. This is a major design consideration in Linux not present in windows, so there is considerable extra work that has to be done, on top of already being much less effective on Linux than they are on windows.
Oh, it’s the Linux-preaching guy again. He always tries to get us to switch to Linux. We just say “sorry mate, we can’t game on Linux” when we see him, he usually leaves us alone after that.
OP’s friends until now
look dude, you were friends with Steve and he died in 91, and he taught us to be more patient with you than you deserve. We don’t care that you’re on the spectrum, this is not okay. Every single time we go out you’re on that Linux shit. Every. Single. Fucking. Time. We’re tired of your shit, we don’t want to hear from you again, you can keep your Linux and shove it up your ass. Just stop bothering us about it.
way back the issue most certainly was that though. There was a time when trying to run games with wine was a frustrating exercise that only resulted in a success in small minority of cases... which meant the answer was almost certainly negative when accounting for the additional restriction of trying to run the games you actually wished to be playing. Not everyone may remember this of course.
That’s great until you decide you want to play more than one game and have to restart your computer 5+ times per day. Then you’ve somehow made the experience exponentially worse than staying on either one
This has been my concern too. It’s great that we’re seeing some specific cases where Linux benchmarks faster than Windows, but that doesn’t mean a damn thing if the one thing I’m trying to play just full on won’t work.
Telling me that I can just also run Windows is counterproductive. If Windows will do everything I want, and Linux will do only some of what I want, now you’re trying to sell me on increased complexity and difficulties and learning a whole new system, without actually getting rid of the problems that come with running Windows in the first place.
I agree with you, which is why I impatiently await a wide release of SteamOS, which delivers a console-like experience for whatever hardware you want, and also the return of Steam Machines for dedicated hardware. I have ChimeraOS installed but it’s far from perfect.
Also I ran a small poll a while back and the vast majority use their PCs for more than just gaming (which makes sense) so we would need to see more Windows-exclusive software ported over to Linux before you could switch over entirely.
But obviously there is an entire market for consoles that Linux hasn’t really penetrated.
Personally I run a dual-boot system so I can have the best of both but I’m not sure Microsoft would approve of that being sold “out of the box”.
The issue is they want to run rootkits and malware instead of games.
Not sorry. Siege, Fortnite, Valorant, all of these games require kernel level access to Windows to run, and the publishers refuse to support Windows.
The only reason I’d ever play games like this in the past is due to peer pressure from friends to play these shitty games together with a bunch of sweats, cheaters and an overall generally toxic community. Especially Siege.
Social peer pressure goes both ways. And I’ve basically peaced out on any of these games in my friends group. That was enough to end that game for game nights, and as those games fade from our memory. I make sure what little memory of it remains is the true tainted and awful form from which they originated.
If you need a kernel level anti-cheat for your game, and nothing else will protect it. Your game is shit, your development cycle is shit, your company is shit, your community is shit, and why would I ever want to play a shit game with shit people from a shit company that forces devs to work under a shit development cycle?
That is not, in fact, the issue. I don’t play any of those games and still can’t play all my games on Linux. I don’t allow kernel level anticheats on my system.
Exactly. If even one of my games doesn’t run, it’s already a pain in the ass. Might as well stay on windows so I don’t have to deal with the headache. They all run on windows. I’ll switch when they all run on Linux.
“Linux is great for gaming. You only need to follow these 25 kernel configuration steps to combine three 3rd party applications and it runs just fine!”
IT professional here, can confirm, Linux is superior and my choice of os.
… despite my work being mostly Windows Server.
Also: IT professionals usually have some experience and/or start out with Help Desk (hell), where you quickly learn what is and is not a good issue report.
This is pretty US centric thinking. Linux doesn’t have licensing. That means it’s used extensively in other countries, especially poorer ones. Some countries entire governments use it. It’s pretty huge in India too. Africa. Places where common folk, not IT professionals, use it but either have rough or no Internet and aren’t communicating in English, especially not GitHub.
While maybe not professional IT people but Linux users are quite known to be passionate about finding solutions. It’s quite recent that you can have a hands off experience with Linux, it was always a tinkerer’s OS before.
I remember in high school having friends who were going crazy at the chance to be the one who could solve an OS issue, like an IT medal of honor.
Actuaries probably get paid more than data scientists. But that’s based on a sample of one: my brother is an actuary and I’m a software dev who works with a data scientist.
As far as I know, the only thing that the new python integration helps with is that users don’t have to install Python or have to know how to use pip to install packages like pandas, because Python doesn’t run locally. It is neat how you can visualize data and show it inline with the Excel document though. My industry is very regulated, so we won’t be able to use it since the data you pass to Python goes to Azure for processing
Me ! I’m a more recent Ubuntu user . But used it alittle in highschool over 10 years ago . Both my parents can’t even use a computer . But I had a really good tech teacher who handed out Ubuntu CDs to who ever wanted one and helped me learn to program .
I’ve been running Linux in one way or another since ~2007, a good 6 years before even considering working in software development. So I guess it was the other way around for me haha. Parents couldn’t be further from the field.
I’ve been using GNU+Linux since 9th grade because that’s when I got a computer. My parents have absolutely nothing to do with computers. What got me there was simple lack of understanding. I barely knew what OS was, but I needed to get one. And soon after, I misunderstood Windows as another distribution, so I went with Linux Mint.
Pilot turned woodworker here. Been using Linux for 10 years. Granted, my father was an IT guy…who’s career had nothing to do with Linux, he’s a Windows Server/AS400 guy.
I am not an IT professional and neither is my dad. I discovered linux through virtual machines on the cloud that you can connect through vnc and fell in love with the commandline.
Can you get a PE license in software engineering? Serious question
Edit: PE = professional engineer.
In most parts of the United States the title “engineer” or “professional engineer” is a title with legal requirements & responsibilities in the same way calling yourself a medical doctor or lawyer would be. Folks with the credentials to be a professional engineer are tested & licensed by the state to practice engineering, similar to the way the bar or medical board would vet lawyers & doctors.
The dude certifying the structural plans for the bridge you drive over every day is in this category. Same with other categories of critical engineering from the fields of chemical, electrical, mechanical, civil, environmental, etc.
That said, TIL software “engineers” aren’t part of this group. Maybe they should be
Reminds about scene from cartoon(EqG to be exact) where character that often perceived as light-headed or just dumb is asked while solving problem on a blackboard and replies “Advanced physics? I thought they really ruined PE”.
A computer engineer is something else entirely. Basically, they often work with electrical engineers to write low level drivers or something, and rarely do much in user space. Software engineers are the opposite.
It probably also helps the report rise to the level of “exceptional” if the reporter understands anything about the backend. If you don’t know what your even looking at its hard to explain tech specifics in detail about it.
I am not tech savvy and I had to report a bug at work for a website/program I have to use. My report was basically “X isn’t working [picture of x not working]”. Microsoft started asking me about my license number and something called RLS…I don’t know any of that. I don’t even know where to find that. I can barely Google that. I took 7 page clicks and 10 minutes just to submit the bug in the first place… My bug reports are shit because I dont know what Im looking at, an IT person probably would have included most of the info they were asking for in the original report.
Thank you, this comment made me feel a lot better that I maybe wasn’t just being flat out incompetent right out the gate. Their questions made me feel pretty stupid and I appreciate your suggesting that its somethings I might just not have been exposed too before as my job is very not tech centric.
As a developer, all I ask for is a description of what happened, what you expected, and details on your configuration (OS, browser, hardware). It would be even more awesome if you could provide a set of steps to reproduce it, but that’s not necessary.
But honestly, a bad error report is usually more useful than no error report. I’ll probably disregard it if it doesn’t have much info, but if I see a lot of similar reports, I can glean info from them to get an idea of what went wrong. But if you have the above, that can mean the difference between a fix being done really soon or me needing to wait for more info.
Not an IT guy, just a dude that got tired of the Windows blue screen of death back in the day and discovered Linux many years ago as an alternative. I can’t code to save my life, but I know enough to use GitHub to report bugs I encounter. It can be time consuming and tedious but when I help alert others that know how to fix the problem I’ve helped in a way that gives me a little bit of pride that I always cherish knowing I’m giving back to the community.
This matches at least my personal behaviour. I’m a programmer myself, so if a game or application has a bug I’ll instantly start thinking about what could’ve caused it and what data would be useful. It’s advantageous for me because the bug may be fixed, and (hopefully) advantageous to the Dev because they get the information they need to fix it. It doesn’t always work though. At one point I sent an entire stack trace and all kinds of debug info to an app developer. I got the response that they’d look into it, but nothing ever comes of it. I’d accept it if they just admitted that it’s not worth their time, but somehow that’s also too hard to say.
Also - it’s not a rootkit - it just loads at boot and has higher privileges than the userspace that you can’t contr… oh. it’s a rootkit. They don’t want you to call it that though. It’s not cancer… it’s a growth.
Funnily enough that’s how a lot of modern cheats work. it’s on a separate box. Good luck catching that automatically vanguard. Hard to out-ring the hardware layer.
If it’s not server based detection it’s exploitable.
I’m not in that line of work but make no mistake if it hasn’t been yet: a cheat vector will probably involve patching the anti cheat software or attacking how it communicates.
there are arduino-based cheats now, you dont even need an expensive box, it hijacks your mouse for aimbots and such. thinking of putting one of mine to use.
Yep, this is what I was referencing in other responses. Purely from a solution perspective it is positively the ultimate “get bent” from the cheat community. Add in some randomness and suddenly there’s zero difference between a ‘good session’ and scripting.
Next up: sorry you don’t have xyz brand mice you can’t play our games. Consumers get forced to buy shit they don’t want or need and meanwhile the cheat / hack community release a patch to emulate it.
It’s the same old cat and mouse game. There are solutions - but a rootkit isn’t it.
not looking forward to mice DRM of all things. but then it will be funny to see their games wilt because most people don’t own the xyz hardware they require. im willing to bet arduinos can fake hardware ids too.
Gabe Newell quit working for Microsoft before Windows 3.0 was released. Valve is an employee-owned private company, Gabe Newell ensured that even after his passing, Valve stays true to their roots as long as there's the majority of employees sharing his ideals.
No, that’s not how it works. You have no idea how valves shares are spread out and neither does anyone else outside the company. Just because Valve employees own shares does not mean their votes are all equal, in fact they almost certainly aren’t.
Employee owned businesses are something else, Valve is just a regular privately owned business, one that the owner works for and takes a salary from.
Employee owned businesses are owned by all of the employees, collectively, with a slightly more democratic decision making process. The CEO still makes the decisions, but employees have a right to have their input heard as shareholders. With Valve, Gabe has the final say on everything.
@TWeaK@LoafyLemon it’s not a co-op. Still, that would be an interesting business model in the gaming space. I think people would be down to support something really alternative. I’m tired of MS and apple and all these business that are still stuck in old school business mindset.
Co-ops are owned by a community, eg customers can be members. Employee owned businesses are just owned by the employees. It’s a relatively new thing, however where it’s being implemented in the UK it’s more of a tax fiddle - the business owner gets their business to buy itself from themselves, then the owner gets zero capital gains tax. If you sell a business for £25 million, you save on a £5 million tax bill. It’s great for people looking to get their investment out of a cash-rich business.
It’s still a pretty good idea, but I’m not holding my breath to see the range of companies adopting Employee Owned practice actually pass on all of the benefits to their employees.
Either way though I’m fine with Valve being a private business, at the bare minimum it retains the opportunity of being better than a publicly traded company. Also, it’s not like video games are some essential service that really belongs under social ownership.
@TWeaK I’m a little confused about the overall post and the UK position since we are talking about an American company but yes, alternative business models are needed. Thank you for contributing.
The UK example was more about their method of transitioning from private ownership to employee ownership, basically me going on a tangent to say that it isn’t always all great. However the nature of the different types of business ownership is consistent everywhere, more or less.
Private ownership - the business works for the owner(s).
Employee ownership - the business works for the employee shareholders.
Co-op - the business works for the co-op member shareholders.
Publicly traded - the business works for the public shareholders. Additionally, the CEO is bound to this by law (both in US and UK, and most other places I imagine), not just their employment contract, and in practice this means the CEO must pursue profits because that’s always what the vast majority of the stock market wants.
Valve is up there at private ownership, not employee ownership. Arguably employee or co-op ownership might be better, but I’m just happy it’s not public.
Like you say, a co-op business in the game space would be interesting. Something like a mutual insurance company, where the customers also own shares in the business.
But his son is now focused on his own business and it’s got nothing to do with gaming. Once Gabe is gone, I doubt Valve will remain privately owned and by the same people.
@WarmSoda@kadu it needs to be public domain or so that way anyone can get the rights to move forward with steam as the community demands it. An open source license will not go far enough.
Obviously other people work there, that doesn’t matter. What matters is who can make legal decisions about the company and I doubt that goes beyond Gabe. He’s a greedy bastard who really only cares about money. He’d make less in the long run if MS bought them out but that doesn’t mean the next person won’t take the payout.
We’ve needed real alternatives to valve for a long time for this exact reason. They’re already a monopoly. If they get bought out they’ll abuse their status even more than they already have.
Not a surprising position for them to take, but yes that isn’t pro-consumer. I still don’t think that really backs up the statement “He’s a greedy bastard who really only cares about money.”
but they arent. there are plenty of other storefronts out there, albeit many being publisher owned. steam continues to succeed not because it has cornered the market like some monopolies, but because it is pro consumer and actually embraced by its target audience
Maybe they could transition to being a worker-owned collective when Gabe wants to retire. I’m not sure what else keeps Valve as we know it alive post Gabe.
Cause its already happened with other services, like Direct2Drive. Lost dozens of games from that being bought/sold/going under/rebranding whatever weird as fuck path its taken to be able to keep my money and not let me have any of the games I bought.
Digital Distribution is a plague, and most people refuse to look past the tip of their instant gratification to realize it.
I argue that digital is good as long as you make backups of your games.
I have an external drive full of steam games that steam can’t touch. So I’ll always have those games. Barring I lose the drive or don’t transfer the files before it becomes unreadable.
Another example where digital is good imo is the Switch. Those tiny game cards can suck my ass. If I drop one on my carpet it’ll be gone until next spring. Having multiple games saved on SD cards is the way to go.
That hasn’t been true for like ten years now.
Obviously anything that needs an internet connection will require steam. But pretty much almost all single player games do not need steam to run.
It varies a bit from game to game, but typically Steam games are intertwined with Steam in one way or another. You can move the files around, but you need Steam to verify and “fix” the files and their associations afterwards.
It definitely does vary though. For example, with KSP I was able to just copy the install directory and have many different install folders for different instances of the game (great for version and mod control). For others, I was able to copy the files, but it didn’t run, not until I manually set up Steam to the install directory and did the verify integrity thing.
Oh we did look. Gabe’s promise was to give us warning and an unlock on all our games so it could run without steam. There might be a jam in the rush to download and backup everything.
I didn’t like digital distribution and have been burned by Stardock (for selling out to Gamestop) and then by Gamestop (for shutting down my account without cause or notice). But Steam is the least offensive of the DD offerings.
Then again I’ve never been wronged by Steam and others have. Others have, amd I understand Steam support can be ruthlessly cold.
I still have CD and DVD games I like with no DD alternative sources. (I’ll buy them from GOG when they’re on the cheap just for convenience.) Some of them have exceeded their official shelf lives, and would depend on finding a no-disc-check mod online.
In this age, we should be able to download a game from any archive and just keep our licenses. But our society and the game industry only gets more and more resentful of its customer base.
If Steam dies, I’ll likely just pirate relentlessly and only actually buy games whose dev teams I want to support. ( Terraria and DRG serve as good examples – games where lighting and mining are complex mechanics). And the industry will suffer every time a DD platforn enshittifies.
Valve did promise their customers will have a way to access their game if the company have to shutdown. But if the company got enshittified instead of dying, suck to the customers I guess.
Other than the part about tons of money, basically nothing you just said is actually true.
I also think you’re conflating the person, Markus “Notch” Persson, with the company, Mojang. By the time Microsoft bought Mojang, and Minecraft, Notch had already left any kind of development role on Minecraft years before.
Notch himself has made several small indie games after Minecraft, none of which were successes. Mojang also made another game after Minecraft, Scrolls (now “Caller’s Bane,” after they got sued by Bethesda over the name). It was also not a success. So much for “not creating anything since.”
Gabe seems to be able to handle wealth much better than notch, at least. If he would have been susceptible to falling off the deep end like notch, he would have already done so.
Know what, that Gabe hasn’t fallen of the deep end like notch? Well, mostly by the lack of any controversy with him personally. Sure that’s not a perfect measure, but it still puts him above notch.
This is the biggest problem with Valve at the moment. They’re awesome, but only because of the current leadership. Once these guys retire or die, it’s very likely Valve will enshittify like every other business.
Valve needs to be hit by regulators at some point. They just have too much market power.
I wish the decent guys who started companies would leave a directive for the company that must be followed to prevent it from becoming just another shitty piece of garbage like everything else these days has become thanks to the geniuses with business degrees running the world.
But there’s no practical way you could hold the future owners of the business to that directive. If you own the business, you get to set the directives, including overwriting previous ones.
The only way to enforce it is to maintain controlling interest in the business. Or, at least spread the interest among multiple parties so no one person can dictate it.
Even then though you could have employees voting to change the direction of the business. If someone offers to buy the business for billions, then it’s possible everyone would vote to accept the sale and change everything.
Valve is not awesome at all. Ffs, they didn’t become a monopoly by accident. People need to stop worshipping this company just because they started packaging wine with their app.
This is the same company that literally started the trend of requiring storefronts and custom installers for their games with HL2… the exact same thing people whine about EA and Blizzard doing.
PC gaming will become a total shit show if Valve dies and they’ll be fully responsible for it.
This is the same company that literally started the trend of requiring storefronts and custom installers for their games with HL2… the exact same thing people whine about EA and Blizzard doing.
But the thing is, Valve were never really dicks about it. They gave you a storefront, but it was actually useful. They collected user hardware data, but presented it aggregated to you and didn’t use it for marketing. Valve did many of the things gamers are rightly wary of, and did some of them first, but they rarely did it in a way that was predatory towards their users, like many other businesses do.
What valve does is so distinct from what most of the industry does the comparison is laughable. Valve is still a company and not our friend sure, but they are not openly anti-consumer like EA or Blizzard. And they don’t abuse their monopolies like Google or Microsoft.
just because they started packaging wine with their app
Even if that’s all they did, that is more than anyone else is doing. What they really did was make nearly every game they sell easily playable without requiring you to use Windows. As byproduct, DXVK (part of Valve’s Proton) provides greater compatibility and performance for Windows users as well (Intel ARC driver and DX9 game support for example). They have salaried employees working exclusively on making this work and their development is open source for anyone to use modify and share. Epic or any other store front could freely take advantage of this work and benefit why don’t they do that instead of whining?
I’m guessing you’re not a programmer yourself? Because it’s really really not that east to /just/ detect in the server side, hacks can be super sofisticsted these days and there are often many client side exploits that you simply cannot detect serverside.
Using rootkit anti-cheat is a shortcut that reduces cost for both dev time and hosting time at the expense of your customers' security and CPU. You also have to lay your cards on the table for those who are attacking you. It is not the right solution for this problem.
Authoritative servers.
Never trust the client, especially with information the player shouldn't have right now.
Look at behaviors and group players based on if you think they cheat or not - let the cheaters play together, no need to spoil their fun and let them realize you know they cheat.
People do some or all of this on the server now, but root kitting all machines to try to solve this problem to play video games is one of the dumbest approaches ever and we will realize it one day when a state level actor pops their zero day against a big install base.
This. Having worked on some in-house anti-cheat solutions myself, it absolutely is just offsetting the processing and security cost to the players. The attack vector of having such a rootkit running on so many devices is just not even close to be worth the trade off of catching marginally (if really measurably at all?) more cheaters.
Never trust the client, especially with information the player shouldn’t have right now.
This is a big part of the problem, but it’s not the only problem. If you do all of that stuff right, you can’t build a responsive first person shooter. There’s some level of trust you need to put in the client.
Disclaimer: This is based on my experience playing shooters and as a programmer. I have not worked on anticheat systems hands on.
We see less and less of the “god mode” hacks where players can send the packet for a carpet bomb and the server just blindly trusts it. Or the ludicrous spinbots that spin at an extreme speed and headshot anyone that comes into line of sight.
What we’re seeing is increasingly sophisticated cheats that provide “buffs” to a player’s ability. An AI enhanced aimbot that when you click gently nudges your hand to “auto correct” the shot and then clicks is borderline impossible to detect server side. It looks just like a player moved the mouse and fired.
The “best” method to prevent these folks from cheating seems to be to detect the system or the game has been tampered with.
Maybe the way to deal with that is to just let it happen and deal with smurfs down ranking… So these “soft” cheaters just exist in the “pro tier” where the pros can possibly stand a chance.
One strategy I have seen that I wish more developers would do is sending “honeypot” information to the game client (like a player on the other side of the wall that isn’t really there but an aimbot or a wall hack might incorrectly expose).
Maybe the increasing presence of hardware cheats will result in new strategies that make these things unnecessary. I keep wondering if a TPM could be used to solve this problem someday… But I’m not sure exactly how/we may need faster TPMs.
You don't necessarily need to detect the cheat itself, you can look at things like players having suddenly higher kill rates and put them into a queue for observation by either more advanced (more expensive) automation to look for cheating or eventually involve a human in the loop.
Even on consoles after a while it becomes obvious that you cannot control the hardware, let alone the software on the client side. Those are the very best argument for this kind of approach and they get cracked eventually.
You don’t necessarily need to detect the cheat itself, you can look at things like players having suddenly higher kill rates and put them into a queue for observation by either more advanced (more expensive) automation to look for cheating or eventually involve a human in the loop.
That’s true, if the player suddenly has higher kill rates. However, that doesn’t work if they’ve been using the cheat from the start on that account. A sufficiently advanced AI powered aim bot would also be nearly indistinguishable from a professional player. Kind of similar to how Google created the CAPTCHA that uses mouse movement … but had to go back to (at least in some cases) the additional old school captcha.
I think by the end of your message you were starting to arc around a little bit to the right way you need to think about clients: as outside your security envelope. (TPM is a joke in my mind, just like client side anti-cheat.)
There are many ways to try to identify and stop cheating on the server side that have not been explored because executives have directed use of off-the-shelf anti-cheat because they do not understand why it is snake oil.
I thought this at first as well, but they have an interesting property.
They have a manufacturer signed private key. If you get the public key from the manufacturer of the TPM, you can actually verify that the TPM as it was designed by the manufacturer performed the work.
That’s a really interesting property because for the first time there’s a way to verify what hardware is doing over the network via cryptography.
Hmmm… I was going to say no because it’s asymmetric crypto, but you’re right if you are somehow able to extract the signed private key, you can still lie… Good point
But… have you considered having control of 0-ring software that runs on hundreds of millions of computers, that can perform targetted updates to change behaviour on just a select few computers, even interact with the network adapters unbeknownst to the OS.
I’m not talking about zero days popping up for this. But rather, this being part of the design?
A less nefarious application: The root kit anti cheats already continuously monitor processes. Say it finds a crypto mining one. It can request the instructions needed to search for a wallet and snatch that off.
A more nefarious one: RK is known to be in the device owned by the kid of a military contractor. Etc.
Trusting the client is a fools errand. So we are in complete agreement. I never understood why the effort isn’t placed on server side. People are very good at knowing when others have cheated. They know this from information that exists on the server side, so with the correct classifier, the server should also be able to know this.
It’s not easy, but it’s really not worth the massive gaping security vulnerability you are giving your users. One disgruntled employee giving out the keys to the castle or one programmer plugging in an infected USB, and every user now has a persistent malicious rootkit. The only way to fix an issue that deep after it gets exploited is to literally throw away your hard drive.
The only way to fix an issue that deep after it gets exploited is to literally throw away your hard drive.
This can’t be right.
Don’t throw your hard drive in the trash. Quarantine the infected computer, and then wipe that hoe and slap your choice of OS back on it and scan/monitor to see if any issues arise.
Edit: since folks may or may not read though the rest of the conversation: I am wrong, throw that SSD/HDD in the garbage like barbarian said.
I’m sorry to disappoint, but with rootkits, that is very real. With that level of permissions, it can rewrite HDD/SSD drivers to install malware on boot.
There’s even malware that can rewrite BIOS/UEFI, in which case the whole motherboard has to go in the bin. That’s much less likely due to the complexity though, but it does exist.
Outside of monitoring individual packets outside of your computer (as in, man in the middle yourself with a spare computer and hoping the malware phones home right when you’re looking) there’s no way of knowing.
Once ring 0 is compromised, nothing your computer says can be trusted. A compromised OS can lie to anti-malware scanners, hide things from the installed software list and process manager, and just generally not show you what it doesnt want to show you. “Just remediate” does not work with rootkits.
Dude… That’s fucked. They should really go a little more in depth on rootkits in the CompTIA A+ study material. I mean, I get that it’s supposed to be a foundational over view of most IT concepts, but it would have helped me not look dumb.
Please don’t walk away from this feeling dumb. Most IT professionals aren’t aware of the scale of the issue outside of sysadmin and cybersecurity. I’ve met programmers who shrug at the most egregious vulnerabilities, and vendors who want us to put dangerous stuff on our servers. Security just isn’t taken as seriously as it should be.
Unrelated, but I wish you the best of luck with your studies!
Good morning! If anything this was a great example of not being able to know everything when it comes to IT and especially cybersecurity. Thank you for your well wishes! I earned my A+ last month and I’m currently working on a Google cybersec certificate, since it’ll give me 30% off on the sec+ exam price. I really appreciate your insight on rootkits and it’s definitely going in my notes!
Just as another thing to add to your notes, in ordinary circumstances, it’s practically impossible for non-government actors to get rootkits on modern machines with the latest security patches (EDIT: I’m talking remotely. Physical access is a whole other thing). To work your way up from ring 3 (untrusted programs) all the way to ring 0 (kernel), you’d need to chain together multiple zero day vulnerabilities which take incredibly talented cybersec researchers years to discover, keep hidden and then exploit. And all that is basically one-use, because those vulnerabilities will be patched afterwards.
This is why anti-cheat rootkits are so dangerous. If you can exploit the anti-cheat software, you can skip all that incredibly difficult work and go straight to ring 0.
EDIT: Oh, and as an added note, generally speaking if you have physical access to the machine, you own the machine. There is no defence possible against somebody physically being able to plug a USB stick in and boot from whatever OS they want and bypass any defences they want.
Cheers to the note as to why the anti-cheat is basically satan in software form. This is the real reason that riot isn’t open to community discussion on this topic. It’s indefensible… and if the userbase understood more they wouldn’t have any users left.
It’s the same reason stuff like antivirus is a huge vector for attack. It runs at elevated permissions generally and scans untrusted inputs by default. So it makes for a great target to pivot into a system. These anti cheat kernel modules are no different in their attack profile. And if anything them being there is a good reason to target them you have a user that has a higher end gpu so the hardware is a known quantity to be targeted.
I’m a programmer, yes it is. It’s not easy in the sense of easy to implement, it’s easy in the sense that everything else is impossible. Client-side anti-cheat is impossible, and by that I don’t mean hard, I mean perpetual-motion level of impossibility. If someone tells you they implemented a foolproof client-side anti-cheat you should be just as skeptical as if someone tells you they created a perpetual motion. It’s impossible, never going to happen, want an example? Robot using a camera to watch the screen and directly moving the mouse and keyboard, completely undetectable from the client side.
From the server perspective the person is cheating or is behaving like a human. If they’re behaving like a human their behavior is completely indistinguishable from a human, so who cares if they’re cheating?, whatever they’re doing has them still at human level so if the game has skill based matchmaking (which most of these games do) he’ll rise up until his cheating puts him in the same level of more skilled humans and everyone has fun. If he keeps rising forever he’s not on a human level, therefore a cheater. More importantly this also penalizes people who buy bot leveled accounts, because their matches will be all against people they can’t hope to win and the game will not be fun.
Server side can also trick clients into giving up that they’re cheating, e.g. sending ghosts behind walls to check for wall hacks or other similar things to gauge player responses.
But what do I know? I’m just a senior programmer who’s been working on servers for some years. l never worked on the client side anti-cheat though, also never tried to build a perpetual motion machine.
Could they harden their clients somehow or maybe randomize memory locations for things? Seems like their should be a better solution than installing malware to prevent cheating.
You’re asking good questions but factor this in: a development team at a game company will only want to spend as little time as possible on this process: it doesn’t make them more money - it costs it. Conversely a hacker / cheater is being paid (or gaining) directly from breaking this code. Which is more motivated? Now remember that the protection has to be in place first. Who has the advantage? Client side code will always be breakable. A rootkit doesn’t change the game - it just adds a new vector to attack for other hackers to exploit.
It’s not easy. And league is free. So banning people won’t work well either. They can’t ban ip addresses either without banning college campuses, some apartment buildings, and Internet cafes.
There are solutions to this problem but they don’t want to permanently ban them. A ban = a new registration… maybe even two. Bonus! You get to pad your ban numbers and user registration numbers at the same time!
But that wastes their clockcycles to make sure you’re not cheating. So much easier to make everyone’s experience worse so they don’t have to upgrade and build out more servers.
I’ve long believed that the main point of client-side anti-cheat is to serve as security theater.
If the player sees “PROTECTED BY ACME ANTI-CHEAT” on the boot screen of a game, they’re less likely to cry wolf when they get their ass kicked. At least, until they see a blatant example of hacking and lose all faith in the ability of the platform to protect them from it; from that point on, everyone better than them must be cheating from their perspective (speaking from firsthand experience here).
Given how infamously toxic and high-strung the LoL community is, I can only imagine that Riot’s basically at the end of their rope here. If you read the original forum post, they sure make this sound like a Hail Mary. “Sorry, it’s just what we have to do to make sure the game is fair.”
Hilariously, they even undercut their own points in the FAQ:
Q: If Vanguard is so good, why do I still see cheats on VALORANT?
For starters, we do not action every cheat or account instantly. Every ban is like broadcasting a signal to the developer that their cheat has been detected and that they need to “update” it. In order to slow the progression of our “cheat arms race,” we delay bans based on the sophistication and visibility of the cheat and cheater, respectively.
But also, cheaters gonna cheat. [Emphasis mine.] We’ve really driven our preventative layer as far as we can feasibly go without colliding with existing setups and hurting legitimate players. [Linux players aren’t legitimate I guess?]
Also, they’re apparently not bothering enabling Vanguard on OS X because apparently few people have actually developed cheats on it yet. Really tells you what’s the more developer friendly platform, Linux or OS X, doesn’t it? Or maybe the OS X market share is too small to care.
They do also mention using machine learning to detect cheating server-side but lament that it’s not always enough information, and that cheat developers have added “humanization” elements that play more like humans.
My thought is… if a cheat doesn’t make someone obviously better than a human player of a certain skill level, then what does it really matter? Congratulations, you made a bot that’s indistinguishable from a human, thanks for padding our player numbers.
The real problem is that botters don’t pay for microtransactions. And players who buy bot-leveled accounts probably don’t spend a ton either. Why would they? They got everything unlocked for them, they didn’t have to grind for it. That’s all Riot really gives a shit about.
In practice, client side anti cheat is essentially DOA because hardware cheats that analyse the player’s screen on a 2nd computer and proxy inputs to your mouse USB have made it so cheat clients are never actually executing code on the host machine.
At that point, even players cant tell someone is cheating because the cheats aren’t modifying the game state in a noticeable way- they’re still weak to effects that obscure your vision and have inputs that are difficult to differentiate from a “real” player.
IMO cheating is a social problem and one that is totally impossible to beat with rootkits by design.
Gaben already refused to sell to EA and made it abundantly clear that we would rather let valve die than go public.
Microsoft also just recently said they’d buy Nintendo if they could.
All this means is that Microsoft is filthy rich and still doesn’t know how to make an original quality game studio. They seem to overly rely on buying out studios and IPs that are successful to rake in more money.
spoilerAll of which reeks of an oligigopoly and reminds me of even worse companies like Oracle and AT&T
The funny thing about selling valve, what would it even give for Gabe? He’s already filthy rich. What more could one want with more money?
Saying no to selling only makes sense in his position, in my opinion. At least I personally would think so. Because then you still keep what is effectively your creation, and can use it to shape the world.
At some point you really do just have enough money.
Well, the idea is you can do something else with the money instead of it being tied up with that company. You could start another venture if you want to. I’m pretty sure Valve is what he wants to be doing though, so starting a different company isn’t really something he’d want to do.
Even if he doesn’t want to run it, doesn’t mean it has to be sold to another company. It can just keep on being a private company with a new handpicked leader. There’s no upside to selling for Gabe. After he passes however… all bets are off.
depends who he passes ownership to. it could be a bunch of inheriters who have no interest in owning/running it and it will be forced to sell off to split shares out. or maybe he gifts it to a single person he sees as a successor. who knows, i dont know shit about his family so have no idea
I would trust Gabe’s judgement 100%. Dude runs one of the most pro-consumer companies in history. In doing so, he has built a fiercely loyal fan base by simply being good to his customers; not trying to squeeze them for every single cent.
Gabe is a rarity; part of a bygone era of business owners and software engineers who truly care about their projects and want to build things that they themselves want to use and play. He’s a smart man and Valve has been his baby since he left Microsoft. He’ll make sure it’s in good hands when and if retirement comes calling.
third option is he sets up some kind of foundation or trust arrangement and testaments his shares to that trust, which is then run by board of trustees as per trust charter. Usually meaning “well board of trustees is entrusted to see to the continued profitable management of the company by selecting suitable new management as comes necessary” combined with possible whatever extra instructions there is as to how to and underwhat principles the company is to be run.
Be it either private trust to benefit the descendants/described beneficiaries or a charitable trust with funds to be used for charitable causes.
Family trusts aren’t that unheard of to exactly avoid the splintering of the ownership and thus risk take over bit by bit.
At some point you really do just have enough money.
Well there is people to whom no amount of money is enough money. Not that it is at that point about, what you can do with that money. Rather by then the amount of money is a leader board and score board all to it’s own. The desire to be Forbes number 1 and then to be forbes number 1 with ever increasing lead to the number 2.
However all indications are, Gabe Newell isn’t one of those people. He would have had plenty of opportunities to cash out and then do some other business dealings to get ever bigger score card number. Don’t really know exactly what else it would tell of him or his character, but the one thing we can pretty confidently tell is “it seems he isn’t about just singularly amassing ever growing pile of wealth as large as possible”. He would have had plenty opportunity to enrich himself way more aggressively and he didn’t.
Well the only one who seemed to actually like Linux at LTT was Anthony(don’t know her new name) Emily. Once she went to the background after her gender transition, enthusiastic Linux coverage more or less disappeared
Linus mentioned that Emily (her new name) has been internally pushing for a Linux gaming revisit on a recent Wan Show, so hopefully something comes of that.
Also an upcoming tech upgrade video will be for someone who’s switching to Linux.
Hopefully the next Linux challenge goes well for them . From what I remember Linus somehow broke his fresh Linux install by just install steam lol . Can’t wait to see Elijah switch to Linux
I dont remember the specific details, but it was a bug in that install version that… Mint Pop_OS! (Thanks Joo)? I think it was? was slow to fix until the video came out or something?
Anyway, long story short, He did ignore a warning, but what happened shouldnt have happened regardless, and it was totally something a novice could do, especially since, as a novice myself, most internet searchable help for linux issues boils down to “run this command, it’ll fix it” with no real broader explanation.
That doesnt mean he isnt an ignorant cunt in a thousand other ways though.
Long story short, there was a bug with apt that Pop!_OS didn’t patch before the release. They did so after the latest version at the time was released. Had he updated his system before trying to install Steam, it’d never happened, that’s the worst part.
I would agree. If you watch the video, you’ll see that Linux Mint’s onboarding process walked Luke through using the Update Manager. Pop!_OS didn’t. Also apparently Pop!_Shop doesn’t or didn’t perform an apt update upon launch for reasons beyond my understanding. Anyone familiar enough with Pop!_OS to know if that was or still is the case?
I’ve done a whole NTSB breakdown on that incident before, but here’s what I hope is the short version:
He was using Pop!_OS. Pop!_OS’ desktop environment was at the time kind of a fork of Gnome. I think now it outright is a fork of Gnome.
It just so happened that a version of the Steam .deb package went out with a buggy set of prerequisite data such that if it encountered a “weird” desktop environment it would declare itself incompatible with this which would make APT uninstall the entire GUI stack, right on down to Xorg. It wouldn’t happen to distros using more mainstream desktops like Gnome or KDE or xfce, but it did effect weird things like Pop!_OS.
This bugged version was apparently the latest version published when the Pop!_OS install image Linus used was made, so that was the version in the apt cache on Linus’ Pop!_OS machine.
In the time between the creation of that install media and the filming of the episode, the bug had been reported and an updated version pushed to the repo.
At no point during the install-first boot process, or while launching the Pop!_Shop did Pop!_OS update the apt cache.
Linus tried to install Steam via the Pop!_Shop’s GUI. behind the scenes it saw the error about incompatibility with the desktop and threw a dialog box that said “Failed to install Steam.” The system was not harmed or altered in any way and continued working correctly.
Instead of googling “popos failed to install steam” to see if there’s a way to fix it, he instead threw a small bitch fit about how Linux doesn’t work and you have to use the terminal for everything. He googled for “how to install steam with the terminal” or similar, and found the command “sudo apt install steam.” Most guides online for installing things using APT tell you to run an update and probably an upgrade command first, I do not know if Linus found instructions that omitted that or if he skimmed too aggressively.
Running the command “sudo apt install steam” printed a lot of STDIO to the terminal including a large list of things it was preparing to uninstall, followed by a plaintext warning in bold text that read (paraphrasing) **WARNING! This operation is very likely to seriously damage your computer. You should not do this unless you REALLY know what you are doing. To continue, type “Yes do as I say.”
It is my belief that Windows trained Linus to ignore such warnings, because Windows constantly throws errors about “this may harm your computer” basically every time it asks for administrator privileges. Linux does not do this; Linux usually accepts a ‘y’ or even just hitting the enter key with no input to mean “yes proceed,” sometimes when it wants you to really stop and think it’ll make you type the whole word “yes.” Having to type that whole sentence feels almost like “update your last will and testament to continue.” I think a lot of users learned it would do that from Linus’ video.
He did so, the computer dutifully uninstalled the entire GUI stack and dropped him into a terminal.
A think to note is that it was completely salvageable. I believe it’d be just a matter of running sudo apt-get install pop-desktop and he’d be back on track. Meanwhile, on windows, download a sound card driver from manufacturers site, click “install”, and your OS won’t ever boot again, not in safe mode, not in recovery from live usb, not anyhow, because it always tries to load all drivers, including broken ones for some reason.
I honestly hope they don’t do another dumb Linux challenge. Linus and Luke both have pre-prepared excuses why a conversion to Linux will fail, for them personally. Stuff like “we can’t run Photoshop” level shit. Dumb “no shit Sherlock” type nonsense.
That means they won’t actually try, they’ll just “do it for the content” and give up again after a month or whatever. The videos will be well done but will ultimately conclude that “Linux still isn’t ready for us” and they’ll leave a bitter taste in any real Linux user’s mouth, because their excuses will be pathetic and the efforts put in will be demonstrably minimal.
The part you are missing is that they are making content that aligns with the majority of their audience. Most people will put in a similar level of effort. Most people don’t care, they just want it to work with the least effort possible.
There were a couple episodes where they had iJustine on as a guest. I think they built a server for her? Anyway one episode they did was they set up a Mac and a Windows PC next to each other, and had Justine use Windows and Linus use MacOS for a series of routine computer tasks. Both found stumbling blocks. Both of them, when hearing what the task is, said to the other “Oh you’re going to struggle with that.” I remember specifically Justine saying that of taking a screenshot on MacOS because apparently the key combination isn’t intuitive, it’s something like Cmd+6 or something?
Why didn’t WIndows and MacOS both get declared unfit for use by normies the way Linux did? They did a similar “here are some tasks to complete” challenge which wasn’t well thought out; how would most people “sign a PDF?” Why would “enjoy HDR content” be on there other than “lol it doesn’t support this.”
I also recall another older episode where (do we retroactively call her Emily for appearances in older videos?) walked James through the process of installing and running games in Linux. Which I think would be a more valuable series of videos than “some guys who fully intend to go back to windows at the end of a month try to slog through Linux unaided I guess.” Do a 30-day Learning Linux challenge, where some newbies who genuinely have a goal of switching platforms do so under the guidance of a veteran user.
I’ll even put my keyboard where my mouth is. I’ve used Linux full time for 10 years now for work and play, I do not currently own any working Windows systems. I’ll volunteer to be that mentor character on camera.
IIRC, it’s cmd+shift+a number between one and four depending on what kind of screenshot you want to take (full screen, window, etc.). Definitely not intuitive.
I only have any idea because I’m required to use a Mac at work. Just went and tested; cmd+shift+4 starts a “select an area to screenshot” process.
Well, to each their own. Also, I can’t say whether this applies to you, but it seems likely that one might evolve a key shortcut preference from one’s early exposure. Mine was Windows and, eventually, Linux.
I like shortcuts involving the Print Screen button because the label is clear to me and because I can take a screenshot with a maximum of two buttons rather than three, none of which clearly express “screenshot” to me.
Regardless of the reasoning, I doubt we’ll come to an accord, but I respect your preference.
I really miss Emily, hope she comes back soon, but I understand her wanting to be on her own for a while, but honestly her videos were the best ones always.
Emily has always been a delight in everything she’s done.
But even as she’s appeared in videos a lot less, It’s nice to know she’s still advocating for FOSS at LTT. Hopefully that will again result in more coverage of the kind of stuff she used to host before her transition.
Jake prefers Linux, too. He rolls his eyes all the time at Linus’ insistence on running Windows servers, and he’s the guy that maintains a lot of that side of the business.
I’m just going to go ahead and say this now, do not expect most windows games to run better on Linux than windows. Typically the case is when you find a well optimized game that is CPU bound, or is natively vulkan. Anything else, expect comparable framerates.
It’s comparable more often than not, but honestly even if it was 17% worse on average I would still stick to Linux and just build a better computer. Which is what I did before proton.
No doubt and I’m the same way, I’m just trying to say that one shouldn’t try to sell Linux solely based on “gaming performance” when it is definitely not the case most of the time.
Linux is not used like windows or macos at all, and new users will definitely be frustrated enough just learning to use the operating system. Believe me, I think it is awesome that we are finally getting another gaming revolution in the community (Linux gaming actually used to be pretty good before around 2010), but keep in mind that these efforts are for the community and steam deck users. Anyone who wants to have it too will ultimately have to join the community and learn the ropes.
I will disagree and that’s why I made this video. Been benchmarking games for 3 years now, mostly on AMD systems. It went from about same performance, to slightly better, to this. 17% average improvement is nothing to laugh at. It’s the difference between a 4090 and a 7900XTX on Windows. So people can literally save $1000 just by using Linux.
What you say, does mostly apply to Nvidia users though.
Man look, I’ve been using Linux as a daily driver for 18 years, people have been saying exactly what you’re saying since before performance was even comparable.
You’re not going to get 17% better performance on the GPU just because you’re using another operating system, it’s not going to happen unless you’re running a Linux native version of the game. Often times, that is not even the case.
Performance can be a little bit better if the game is natively opengl or vulkan, but if it is directx (the vast majority of windows games) then it is going to be comparable at best in GPU-bound scenarios, I.E. most of the games people are playing on PC.
You can’t just magically put more transistors in a GPU just because you are running a different OS. CPU bound games run better on Linux because of the god-tier scheduler, but a GPU is essentially a computer in itself, all drivers do is tell the GPU to take this information and translate it into something you see on a screen.
By the way, the Nvidia thing has been false for quite some time now. I primarily use AMD on Linux, but the only place you will run into issues with Nvidia is wayland, otherwise it works perfectly fine everywhere else.
I don’t see an argument which disproves my results apart from you disbelief. But I like the Nvidia comment. I’ll do a video of Linux vs Windows on my 3080M laptop. We’ll see how true is that Nvidia works as well as AMD on Linux. :)
Go right on ahead, I’ve done the tests myself already.
Keep in mind though that if you are using a laptop, nvidia tends to work better when paired with Intel vs amd for the sake of graphics offloading.
I don’t think you understand how this works, I’m not trying to disprove anything, you are the one trying to prove something. You chose 10 very specific games to run these tests, some of them being heavily CPU bound, and state that you are receiving an increase in GPU performance when it is simply not the case. All of these games are also optimized for proton, which does not help your case.
Tell you what, why don’t you give something like “Spec Ops: The Line” a test? Halo Infinite? 40k Darktide? Vermintide 2? Dying Light? Hell, infinite and darktide are very popular in the Linux gaming community, I was even one of the beta testers for darktide.
You say that like I’m afraid to do it. You’re missing the point that these games don’t have benchmarks lol. If you want I can do a gameplay comparison but don’t tell me, the areas or movements are not the same. :)
Also these games couldn’t be more diverse. I tested DXVK, VD3D and Vulkan (both on Linux and Windows) with these games. If you can find a more diverse benchmark please let me know, cause I haven’t found one.
Also, I’m already doing benchmarks on my i7-10870H and 3080 laptop. Linux won’t go above 80W, cause of the Nvidia Drivers (545 Beta btw) so the difference will be IMMENSE for Windows there.
You don’t need a specialized benchmark to do a benchmark, you can use a realtime rendered cutscene, you can do an average over several games. That’s how they have been done for like a decade and a half at this point.
Also, I’m not referring specifically to mobile graphics nvidia, but nvidia altogether. Linux laptop gamers make up a very very small amount of total Linux gamers, it is an incredibly small niche of two already small niches, both being Linux and laptop gamers. Yes, of course if you have a limit to the total amount of power, it will lag behind.
I gave you a list of games, start there, my list is also diverse and includes all of those except for vulkan, which if you want, throw doom eternal in there, though as I have already stated vulkan will get a small increase on linux over windows in terms of GPU performance, so that’s not really proving anything anyone doesn’t already know.
If you want a fair comparison, limit it to 80 watts in windows as well. Remember though that power is NOT EVERYTHING when it comes to GPU performance. All of the games I detailed above are GPU bound games and will be a fair comparison. Just a heads up darktide may or may not have graphical glitches on your system if you are running amd (both operating systems, it is hardware related), I’ve worked with the devs to fix it in the past but it seems like recently people have been having issues with it again.
“works fine” is very different than “is equivalently optimized.”
Valve has done a lot of work to get games to work well on the Steam Deck, and that likely translates to other AMD GPUs. So it makes total sense that Valve would optimize the Proton translation layer for DirectX calls to the AMD driver differently than the NVIDIA driver (or rather, in a way that AMD handles better). A big issue in GPU optimization is keeping it busy, so perhaps the AMD driver working with Valve’s patches on the DirectX to Vulkan layer improve utilize m utilization. That could translate to a modest performance improvement even on well optimized games (perhaps 5-10%, probably not more than 20%).
I don’t know if that’s what’s going on here, but it’s a plausible explanation.
I can see why you’d think that, but what you fail to understand is that valve is not the only one working on proton, and valve themselves did not even make DXVK. Those are free and open source efforts and valve even pays external devs to commit to that software. I’m telling you that DXVK itself is not going to give a boost to graphical performance because it literally cannot, those are extra instructions that your GPU has to perform in order to send out frames.
Directx to vulkan translation is exactly that, translation. It receives directx calls and translates them to vulkan. For one, it has overhead, two, if the game is optimized, it is already going to be running at max performance on windows, using DXVK is going to slow the GPU time down because it will have to perform more calculations. No scheduler will save you from that, not even the Linux one, because it isn’t something that is handled by the scheduler.
I never said Valve built DXVK or even WINE, just that they have a vested interest to ensure it works well on their AMD-based hardware
I never mentioned anything about the scheduler or any Linux imtrinsics other than the AMD GPU kernel module
DirectX -> Vulkan isn’t a direct translation since the APIs aren’t 1:1, so there’s going to be some tuning in how APIs are mapped, and the tuning can differ depending on the GPU driver you’re using.
It’s the same with processors, you can optimize a compiler to work better on AMD vs Intel or vice versa (look at Intel C++ compiler benchmarks for an example of that), even if they use the exact same set of instructions because the microarchitectures are optimized differently. This is because the way the instruction set gets mapped to the microarchitecture can impact performance significantly (something like 10% is possible, depending on the benchmark).
GPU drivers are complicated, and there are a lot of areas where the interaction between the driver, software, and system services can be optimized. AMD’s drivers are open source, which helps with those optimization efforts. Then you throw in a big, well-funded, and motivated company like Valve funding development (both through salaries and donations) and you end up with AMD GPUs getting extra attention for things like DXVK.
So I would expect AMD on Linux to perform better vs NVIDIA on Linux when compared to AMD vs NVIDIA on Windows. As in, the performance difference on Linux vs Windows would be more favorable for AMD cards than NVIDIA ones because AMD on Linux gets more attention than NVIDIA on Linux. I don’t expect the same for compute, since NVIDIA invests heavily in that space on Linux, so it’s not an inherent advantage of the platform (e.g. the scheduler discussion), but a question of where optimization efforts are focused.
Alright look, I’m not going to argue about who said what because we both know what we said and it is unrelated to the topic at hand.
The reason the windows amd driver is bad is not due to performance, it is the very same reason why the proprietary driver is bad on Linux, it is horrible reliability.
There are circumstances where they trade blows and circumstances where they perform similarly. If you really want to compare the two based on OS alone, you need to compare the equivalent drivers which is the proprietary one.
We’re already not doing an apples to apples comparison here because we’re comparing WINE+DXVK vs DirectX. Comparing the OS itself isn’t that interesting, at least from an end-user perspective, what is interesting is comparing the typical user experience on both platforms.
Valve is optimizing for that typical user experience on their Steam Deck, and that translates to the desktop fairly well. They’re not really doing the same on Windows, so it’s interesting to compare devs+manufacturers optimizing stuff on Windows vs the community+Valve optimizing stuff on Linux.
Why would not comparing the OS itself be interesting? That is literally the foundation of everything you are seeing on the screen.
You also can’t just compare WINE+DXVK to DirectX, because you can actually use DXVK on windows. If the video title was “directx vs dxvk” then that would be totally fair, but it is not, it is called “windows vs linux”. I’m simply trying to say that the vast majority of games are not going to see a 17% increase in GPU performance, your biggest boost is going to lie with CPU bound games because it is the truth.
The only time you’ll see a game perform better on a GPU on Linux is when the game has a native version, and even then that only applies if they actively develop that version, many games are not actively developed and are even a few versions behind.
Because regular users aren’t going to be changing drivers based on the game, or doing a ton of system-level configuration to get a bit better performance.
So it should be defaults vs defaults.
If we want to compare OSes, we should do targeted benchmarks (Phoronix does a ton of those). There are far more interesting ways to compare schedulers than running games, and the same is true for disk performance, GPU overhead, etc.
you can actually use DXVK on Windows
How many people actually do that though? I’m guessing not many.
“Windows vs Linux” is comparing the default experiences on both systems, and that’s interesting for people who are unlikely to change the defaults (i.e. most people).
The only time you’ll see a game perform better on a GPU on Linux is when the game has a native version
That’s just not true, as evidenced by this video. If you take the typical setup on Windows vs the typical setup on Linux, it seems you get a 17% average performance uplift on Linux on these games.
That doesn’t mean Linux is 17% faster than Windows, nor does it mean you should expect games to run 17% better on Linux, it just means Linux is competitive and sometimes faster with the default configuration. And that’s interesting.
Linux does not have a default configuration, that’s why we have over 600 distros. If you want to have a baseline “default configuration” then fedora would be the way to go, which he has not used.
Yes, he got a performance uplit by 17% on average in these games, the point he is trying to make is that you can get this in every game on Linux which is what is not true.
Most of those games are also CPU bound, an area that Linux is going to destroy windows. Once again, I am referring to GPU performance specifically, as that is the general point that OP makes with these posts.
That may be true, but de facto defaults today is Proton experimental on Steam with the a recent Linux kernel. That’s pretty much the same across all distros.
That’s not all the factors that play a role in performance in games.
For instance, what fork of the kernel are they using? Are they using zram? What graphics driver are they using? Gamescope? Gamemode? All of those things affect performance of a game to varying degrees.
Also, Proton experimental is definitely not the default on any system, that would be Proton 8.
Yup, the difference between Ubuntu, Fedora, and Arch or whatever isn’t going to be all that big, assuming you’re working with each distribution’s default kernel and running with a Steam’s provider runtime. You might get 1-2% here and there, but that’s pretty much within run to run variance anyway.
Sure, but each distro has a default configuration, and distros don’t vary that much in terms of performance with those default configurations for playing games. If there is a consistent performance difference, it’ll likely be something like 1-2%, which should be within run-to-run variance and not really impact the results.
And if anyone assumes that an average between 10 games represents the difference you’ll see on average for your own games doesn’t understand statistics because 10 games is not enough to be a representative sample, especially since they weren’t even randomly selected to begin with. It’s still an interesting result.
CPU bound… Linux is going to destroy Windows
You’re being hyperbolic here.
The differences, all else being equal, should be pretty small most of the time unless there’s a hardware driver issue (e.g. when Intel’s new p-core vs e-core split came out, Windows had much better support).
If we’re seeing a huge difference, more is going on than just a “better” scheduler or more efficient kernel or whatever. It’s much more likely Windows is using DirectX and Linux is using DXVK or something. The bigger the gap, the less likely it’s the kernel that’s doing it.
As someone who has used Linux exclusively for ~15 years, these kinds of benchmarks are certainly exciting. However, we need to be careful to not read too much into them.
It sounds like some time in that 18 years, you solidified this impression, and are choosing to not recognize the advancements in Proton and drivers that have occurred post-Steam Deck.
I’ve been using Linux since before Xwindows existed, and I am open to OPs research. Just because we’ve used it longer, doesn’t make either of us right without proof. OP supplied evidence. Prove them wrong.
I’ve been using Linux since before Xwindows existed
Why are you blatantly lying like this? X came out seven years before the Linux kernel was even released. And even then, there wasn’t a working system for the Linux kernel when it was released. Keep in mind I said DAILIED Linux for 18 years, I didn’t say USED, I’ve been using Linux for 27 years now. I actually remember a time when Linux was not an operating system that people would use to play games on.
I’m using my time specifically in the community as an example to show that this is not the first time I have heard this. OP supplied evidence in ten very specific games here, there are over 12000 games on protondb that are “playable”, not even verified. I have run across myself quite many games that run at half to three quarters the performance that it does on windows, and that is absolutely fine.
Telling people that using Linux will get you a “free performance boost as much as 17%” when it very likely will NOT, will create a lot more angst towards the Linux community than it already is. The elitists are already doing that for us, we don’t need more of it.
We should be pushing people towards Linux for digital privacy+security and free software, not cherry picked performance boosts.
Yes, I very well recognize the black magic sourcery of proton and wine, but you are sitting here and trying to tell me that proton is somehow going to make your GPU somehow physically push more calculations per cycles just because it is running Linux. Not even giving me the “mesa drivers” spiel which is also BS, as performance is not the main area that the Foss drivers are better in.
Linux is not going to break the laws of physics buddy, I’ve already said what I said, boost in CPU bound games, little to no boost in GPU bound games. If you’re seeing a boost, it’s because you have a CPU bottleneck and you are getting it because of the scheduler.
Not enough people running nvidia realize just how much nvidia does to make sure you stick to their proprietary software. That you can close most of the performance gap with FOSS on AMD is an amazing finding.
Unfortunately it won’t convince many who haven’t already seen the benefits of a more open system.
how much nvidia does to make sure you stick to their proprietary software
Holy fucking shit you are extremely misguided. Are you not aware that the Linux nvidia drivers are proprietary? The only reason that the mesa drivers are awful is because they barely support the 10 series and they don’t support the new instruction set of the 20’s and above.
If you are running Nvidia on your system and it is above a 10 series, you are running proprietary software. Big whoop, steam is proprietary too, so are the vast majority of the games you play on steam.
Hell, nvidia used to be the ones supplying an open source driver on Linux like 14-15 years ago, AMD didn’t have that, only the proprietary driver. DO NOT OWE ALLEGIENCE TO ANY PUBLICLY TRADED COMPANY, that’s exactly why we don’t have good FOSS drivers for nvidia now.
Those are the mesa drivers, not the “amd” drivers.
Those very same drivers work on Intel cards and pre-20 series nvidia cards. Mesa is not an AMD project or an Intel project either, that is an independent team.
Even then, those drivers are for allowing the GPU to display to a screen and interact with the system. They are pretty much the same idea as the Microsoft basic display adapter. You still need the xf86 drivers to display X, the opengl drivers for opengl, cuda for cuda, vulkan for vulkan, etc. Those are all separate components because they have libraries included with them.
If all of those extras were built into the kernel, the kernel would be like 2 gigabytes, not 150ish megabytes. It is literally enough to get you going with a getty and that’s about it.
The drivers in the kernel (MESA) work with AMD out of the box. If you have AMD hardware, you don’t need anything else. What I said was “AMD drivers are currently in the kernel”. I did not specify that these drivers are developed by AMD – you seem to care a lot about that, but it’s not part of the argument I was making.
Again, you seem to have misread my first comment, which on the Linux side means: you still need proprietary nvidia drivers on Linux. This is also true for Windows, where many folks are perfectly happy to continually update GeForce Now and stay in that ecosystem. That was the point of the comment.
I’m not coming at you with hostility, I am informing you that what you are saying is incorrect. If you keep on skimming over everything I say, then perhaps I may get hostile because that is extremely annoying.
If you are so sure of yourself on the kernel driver front, then do me a favor and fire up gentoo or arch and try to run a desktop environment or window manager without the mesa packages installed. You’ll find that xorg has mesa as a dependency, and there’s a very good reason for that: it’s because that’s not what the kernel driver is for, mesa itself is larger than the kernel itself. The kernel driver is exactly what I said it is, it allows the operating system to see and interact with the device, it doesn’t tell the device how to do its job, it tells it “here are some pipes, you will receive information from certain ones, and send it through others”. That’s exactly what a kernel driver does, there are no libraries or anything of that nature which is the overwhelming bulk of what makes a graphics driver.
Also, geforce now is optional, you can as always install the drivers without the useless spyware application that nvidia provides.
If you keep on skimming over everything I say, then perhaps I may get hostile because that is extremely annoying.
What is annoying is getting novel after novel of irrelevant information. Can you actually tell me what part of my first comment you are referring to?
The closest I’ve seen is that you took “AMD drivers” meaning explicitly developed by AMD, but that’s not how adjectives work. Now you are all about needing more than MESA, which is also fine and correct, but irrelevant to my comment about nvidia drivers.
Go read this and do not reply back until you understand what it is we are talking about.
RADV is not built into the kernel.
Stop trying to sidestep and make it seem like I’m misunderstanding, you know full damn well that when I say AMD drivers that I am referring to drivers for AMD hardware. You have the Foss drivers (mesa), the open source drivers, and the proprietary drivers. All of these are AMD drivers.
Mesa isn’t a kernel driver. AMDGPU is the name of the kernel module and it’s primarily developed by AMD. Mesa provides OpenGL, Vulkan, etc. implementations and is funded by AMD, Intel and Valve (among others). There’s also AMDGPU-PRO which is a proprietary alternative to Mesa from AMD.
That does not change my point in any way, mesa is not built into the kernel, which you need as a dependency to use X, which is required to run a window manager and/or WINE. I never ever said mesa was a kernel driver.
yeah i have a work college that i got to use vim keybinds in most software but when i tell him that he could control his whole system like that if he switched to linux he dosen’t like the idea because he isn’t used to using linux
Not enough people realize how much AMD does to make sure people stick to their proprietary software. Nvidia software that is.
A lack of ROCm support on consumer hardware is simply inexcusable. Nvidia makes a shit ton of money with the AI boom, because people like to work with stuff they already know. And it’s infuriating, because Nvidia cards have way less VRAM.
Honestly, if you use Proton-GE's FSR feature for games that don't offer built-in FSR/DLSS + GameMode, you can def beat Windows performance in some Windows-only games. I know it's kinda cheating, but it does net you higher FPS on the same graphics settings.
This is why I gave up buying on GOG and buy my games exclusively on Steam. Valve has made linux a viable gaming platform through seamless proton integration and steam deck. GOG on the other hand hasn’t even built a linux client after all these years.
I mean, I’m not naive to think valve does anything for anything other than money and self preservation. That doesn’t mean I (and the overall linux community as a whole) don’t greatly benefit from it. I want to incentivize their actions which benefit me. I love that I have been able to not boot into Windows for close to a decade because of proton, so I buy from them. I hate that GOG for all their drm free policy don’t support linux, and that I have to jump through hoops to get their games working on linux (which is again made easier because of valve’s proton), so I don’t buy from them.
I agree GOG and Valve have different objectives. GOG’s objective is to provide drm free games, where as Valve’s objective is to make linux a viable gaming platform so they can stay independent of Microsoft. My objective aligns with Valve, so they get my money.
I’m not naive to think valve does anything for anything other than money and self preservation.
I’m really not one for optimism but Valve really does seem to do things that are not entirely to their benefit. Compare the stark contrast to publicly-traded greedy companies like Apple, for instance.
When it comes to hardware, Apple goes out of their way and invests their vast resources into ensuring you have to trash your devices prematurely while Valve goes out of their way to make their components modular, attach with screws, and make first-party parts available through third party storefronts.
Apple maintains complete control over every piece of software you can install on your device, and even the operating system itself. Valve builds onto an open source OS, adds a “return to desktop” button, and while they don’t help you install 3rd party stores, they don’t put up any artificial barriers to doing so yourself.
Valve could absolutely do all the scummy shit that Apple does and get away with it because they have a similar amount of influence over their industry, and they would probably make buckets of money doing it, but they choose not to.
You could say similarly scummy things about EA, Ubisoft, Microsoft, Blizzard, etc. etc., but not Valve (not to say that they’ve never done anything ethically questionable).
It really seems like they just don’t want to be scumbags, which is incredibly refreshing in these times.
Valve is a private company and hasn’t been contaminated by modern, investor focused mindsets. Valve is a company that tries to earn a profit by selling a service people want to pay for. This is becoming increasingly rare with more and more companies focused on investor return rather providing goods and services in exchange for their profits.
I’m most anxious about what happens to valve post-gabe. You can bet there are tons and tons of crappy wall street types just drooling to ruin Steam for the rest of us.
@HughJanus@greenskye I agree that gog is not supportive of games running on Linux unless that game is already a Linux game. Funny enough, said games may even be playable on Linux but gog will just have the windows port of that game on gog (Alien Isolation for example). So, I agree, if you are on Linux and use steam, then it’s clear to use steam like an iPhone user using Apple Music. It just works.this is where I say that steam should be more open so drm games on steam don’t need steam launcher
I bought Cuphead($14), 4 of the Batman Arkham games($4-5), and Hyper Jam ($4).
Also installed shortcuts for Xbox and Nvidia cloud gaming. Xbox is fairly impressive. Just played a couple of quick rounds of Fortnite. Nvidia I was waiting forever for a slot so I didn’t get too far with that.
You are right now that I think about it. Valve are a throwback to when companies actually had to make the best product to make the most money.
With these public traded companies the incentive is just to make a line on a graph go up by any means necessary, normally to the detriment of the consumer. They are only there to appease their shareholders, and get more investors.
Private companies, on the other hand, can only make the line go up by making products that more people want to buy, and both the consumer and the company benefit.
I love my Steam Deck and have recently made small steps in my journey away from Windows. I installed Pop OS on a laptop. Do you have any tips that might make that transition easier?
There’s a key point in the article that emphasizes that valve are indeed “being nice”: their policy is " upstream everything".
Yes the motives are still keeping a foot out in case Microsoft decides to screw them over in some way, but they could (as many companies do) keep the improvements all for themselves, buy developers and make a closed source version of any of the tech they have been funding, locking down steamOS to only allow steam games and so on.
They couldn’t legally create a closed source SteamOS, but they also aren’t required to “upstream everything”.
I’m not a legal expert of any kind, but AFAIU they are only legally required to send you the changes they made to the source code on request (with GPLv3).
Though I disagree that this is Valve being nice, IMO doing this makes sense for most companies working in this space, as their code being accepted upstream means they benefit from anything the community has built up around the project, and they don’t have to play catchup with upstream.
Complete nonsense, even publicly traded companies upstream their open source code because it makes business sense. Valve doesn’t do anything to be nice and never has. They’re creating their own market to sell to in case MS locks them out.
And I don't buy games out of the bottom of my heart to give those companies more money. So why should I care about their reasoning, as long as they aren't inherently unethical? In the end it's a win / win situation that we can both benefit from. I personally cannot compare Valve & Microsoft here, because Microsoft acts in a way that is ultimately not a win situation for me as a customer anymore. Google started similarly, but then went to shit in how they behaved, hence why I degoogled myself for at least the majority of their services, especially their search engine. If Valve continues to benefit me as a customer, then I as a customer will continue to benefit Valve. That's our contract, or mutual agreement.
That’s not fallacious at all. I imagine the guy above knows valve aren’t a selfless charity.
There’s a guy in my area that goes around with his pressure washer and cleans grimy road signs, park benches, etc (because the council doesn’t seem to give enough of a shit to do it themselves!)
He does it because the goodwill and publicity he gets from it benefits his business (he cleans everything from walls and houses, to wheelie bins and industrial/farming equipment).
He is not acting out of pure altruism, but does it really matter? His/Valve’s actions are still benefiting people regardless.
You do you. But I will say that I am actually happy that CDP haven’t made a linux client. Partially because… gog galaxy is REAL bad.
But mostly because they don’t need to. They provide either APIs or consistently navigable sites so that stuff like Heroic Launcher and other third parties can do it for them. And while I wish they would offer Linux versions where applicable, the gog installer has also more or less become a “standard” for stuff like Lutris to apply recipes to anyway.
I am happy that Valve are increasingly treating Linux like a first class citizen (even if a lot of that is just to spite MS and maximize Valve’s control over PC gaming…). But we also should not be dependent on vendors specifically targeting Linux and should instead encourage them to provide hooks for others to do it for them.
Which… is ironically what Valve did. They stopped encouraging devs to make linux releases (Steam Machine era) and now just pump money into Proton so they don’t have to.
I only made this comment because for some reason GOG seems to be more preferred by linux users than Steam, where as Steam has done a lot more for linux, and it not just works for Steam. GOG is now easily usable on linux mainly thanks to Valve’s proton. I don’t mind if game devs don’t make as many games for linux. There is a huge chicken and egg problem with game development and userbase. Before proton they had all the reason to make games for linux but most didn’t because it didn’t make much financial sense to them. Now they don’t have to worry about it. Plus, linux is much more than gaming. Because there is more people using linux now because of gaming, software other than games would be interested in building for linux, because the userbase is getting there.
Steam is even helping to push more people to Linux, by ending Steam support on WIn7, this January 2024.
I would probably have left Win7 running on several older machines, but like XP it’s become so widely unsupported that I can’t really condone using it online anymore even if the app-services allowed it. Unlike XP, there’s a lot of apps that would run fine on Win7 if supported; but like XP there’s just not much incentive for a dev to support such an old OS except as a pet project.
Win ≥8 is awful; I’ve helped Win10 users recover from the most insanely unacceptable issues I’ve ever seen in ≥35 years of using computers, with absolutely useless official responses made in each case. I will never poison one of my own machines with something so heinous as Win10, just for the sake of a game. And other than games, I don’t see a compelling use case for Windows anymore.
So, Linux, & holding out hopes for decent Steam action on Linux, I guess!?
I omitted to mention that the number of thigh highs in my wardrobe have remained largely unchanged, so far anyway, and that I managed to avoid letting jeans-mania spill over into whatever passes for my real life.
Bought a NAS and set up all .arrs and cancelled all my subscriptions (- Spotify)
Home media server with Jellyfin
Shared said server with friends and family via Tailscale
Set up my very first server on a low end device running headless Debian, all from scratch with docker and Portainer. Currently running a Valheim server
All this with 0 previous Linux experience. Reddit beeing cunts made me learn a lot of cool new things these part 12 months!
I’m on a similar journey and have started self-hosting as many services as I can. I’ve got Jellyfin (open source Plex alternative), a WebDAV server to replace google drive, a Valheim server, and a git server to host the code. I’m doing this with kubernetes on an old mini PC I picked up for 50 bucks on eBay. I plan to put more mini PCs in my friends’ and family’s homes to build a cloud for us with backups of everything stored in multiple locations. It’d be cool to pass it down to the next generation and have our family memories preserved in a medium we own completely.
For reals though, it’s my favorite distro because it taught me a bunch and also, once I understood that bit, it really is the only one that just worked on all my machines at the time, 15 years ago.
A stock market can still work. The ultra high speed market we have now is a problem. Ultra fast trading encourages fast, short term thinking.
A stock market with an update once per day could work better. It would take all the fast impulse trading out of the market, while still allowing price adaptation. When runs and crashes take weeks to play out, it’s a lot easier for cooler heads and logic to prevail. This, in turn would favour the sort of traders favouring long term stable investments.
The price updates whenever someone buys or sells, so doing that once a day may be a bit difficult to implement. Forbidding day-trading / imposing a minimum holding time on the other hand may be easier.
A queue type setup could likely work fine. Buyers and sellers could list their offers/requirements as a range. A round robin double blind auction matches buyers and sellers. The new price is calculated, based on this, and a new queue is opened.
Forbidding the various high profit rent seeking would be a little like trying to block a sieve. There are so many variants and workarounds, that closing them all would be difficult. It would also be a lot more vulnerable to being watered down, or declawed completely.
If once per day is too coarse, it could even work at once per hour. The key is it leaves time for people to think rather than reacting from gut instinct and high speed computer programs.
Sounds nice, but I guess the first step is to take control away from the likes of Citadel / Kenneth Griffin since they take advantage of all that information and they already get to bid against every order placed in real time.
I think our government should definitely get on that. In the meantime forbidding this kind of play aka taxing the living shit out of day-trading (like the current short-term/long-term gain system but actually painful in the very short term) should be pretty simple to implement.
I definitely agree with the need for short term fixes. Unfortunately, I suspect the core issues are inherent to the current system. Then again that applies to a lot of things at that level, and perfect is the greatest enemy of good.
Just run the company in a way where you don’t really care about maximizing profit. As long as you’re not at a loss and are liked, you will be successful.
Valve could probably be much more profitable at the expense of being a bigger dick, but Gabe is chill.
Also because valve is private, they don’t have any legal obligations to return maximise profit. They can purposefully lose money if they want and it’s not illegal. (At least to my knowledge)
Thats actually what valve does. Valve mandates all games on platforms must be the same retail price (e.g a game on Steam cannot be sold for 60$ retail, but be sold for 50$ on epic), not including deals and sales.
Its standard with how physical stores demand that digital copies of games must retail at the same price as physical else stores would see that as an attack on the business by the company.
There is essentially some level of price normalization.
Private companies can have shareholders(all nfl teams but the Packers), its just a game of finding shareholders who doesnt care about constant short term profit.
Since it’s a private company he can just appoint anyone he wants to be the ceo. Maybe his son will take it or maybe he will maintain ownership of it until I’m too old to care.
Its unknown exactly how much money Valve makes but it is a safe bet they are probably one of the most profitable companies on the planet considering they get a cut of more or less every single PC game sale. Others have larger revenues but, relative to expenditures, they are likely a top 100 if not top 50.
But yeah. Everyone just needs to figure out a billion dollar idea, luck out that people liked them enough to ignore the negatives while everyone else (Stardock, Atari, Gamespy, etc) were getting torn apart, and then maintain an effective monopoly for two decades. Easy.
But they do run it to maximize profit. There’s just allowed to do it creatively instead of obsessing over short term gains.
I mean the company essentially gave up on AAA games for well over a decade because they were making more money from steam, and Gabe famously only approves projects that have a plan to turn a profit or expand Valve’s market.
They didn’t spread into Linux out of sheer principle. It gives them more control and influence over the market to separate themselves from Windows. And they’ve done tons of shady stuff with steam like refusing to give refunds until they were sued by state governments.
I don’t read it so cynically, yes it’s in their best interest and a very smart play, but I don’t read malice into it though. Good business move, but also good for the communities and projects they’re contributing to.
Valve is the prime example of rent seeking behavior. It's a private company that collects economic rents on a market thanks to that market being the biggest. They're a private company and their only goal is to preserve those rents. They do that by fostering goodwill. They're everything I hate about capitalism, but I don't hate them for doing it.
They are also a good example of positive middleman behaviour. While they take their cut, the value they provide to both sides is huge.
They are also in a position where they are still easily replaceable. Their dominance is from doing it well, not because they have an absolute lock in.
Part of why this works is because they don’t have to prioritise short term profit over long term. Most companies like this get brought up and pumped dry. Valve seems to be the exception.
I don’t think you can do that on EGS or GOG. So they ask 30%, but only if they actually helped make the sale. If you drove the revenue yourself, they’re happy to distribute the game for free on their platform.
That’s about the least scumbag model I can think of.
Ultimately the 30% is as high as Steam estimates they can charge before they have to fear companies leaving their platform and bypassing steam altogether. Honestly I’m surprised it has not happened yet. 30% is super high, and users are not at all locked down like they are in the console market.
Epics is much lower because theyre trying to entice devs, but they are the anomally in the sea of pricing.
Epics trying to win market by enticing devs instead of working on features for the consumer, thats their market plan. Epic wasnt the only platform to have lower than 30% cut. Discord sold games at 10% cut, itchio is similar. Devs essentially debate of the baked in features of the platform and its audience is worth the 30% cut(the existing community, game review system, steams controller api, steam workshop, steamvr). Even just the client. ESPECIALLY to Linux users, on a consumer POV, ask yourself about ease getting to use the native client. Valve offers steam natively, and does a lot of work making the consumer end (and developer end too) easier on linux. EGS for example doesnt even run natively on linux, and requires a 3rd party launcher to run. People tend to take for granted all the things Valve has done for both the consumer and Developer.
Discord massively failed to get users, and devs saw little market in it. Epic takes advatage of their position using unreal engine, and offers some devs money upfront for exclusivity, something certain audiences on PC absolutely hate.
Users use steam because it simply offers them the best user experience. There are a ton of people who just buys their games directly from valve and not a 3rd party site. To a consumer, money’s not necessarily the problem on their end, and they dont see the 30% hit that developers take. Something good for the developer is not necessarily good for the consumer and vice versa, and many people make that mistake and conflate that to be the same thing when it isnt.
no cost for keys if you sell stuff outside the Steam store
no cost for downloads
no cost for improvements to games
Valve’s customers are publishers and devs, and they’re charging a finder’s fee for connecting customers to the games. To me, that’s not rent seeking, that’s a direct exchange of money for a service. If you don’t think the service is valuable or think you can do better, then generate keys and sell them elsewhere and you won’t need to pay Valve a cut.
Valve is capitalism done right imo. You only pay when you receive a service, and only when you profit from the service. Steam also has a fantastic refund policy as well, which is surprisingly rare in the digital goods market.
they have created a service that didn’t exist that’s beneficial to both the consumer and the seller, they don’t do any anti-competitive shit with it as far as I am aware.
in what world is what they do rent-seeking?
are you an edgy 15 year old that just learned a new word and didn’t understand it?
Well, Valve is privately-owned company and it’s investing a lot of money into the free software ecosystem right now. Yes it’s capitalism but very different in principles to the rest of the market.
Valve is far from a typical company. While technically not, they operate pretty much like a worker owned cooperative. Have a look at their employee handbook: www.valvesoftware.com/en/publications
(and Igalia, the company presenting in OP is really a worker owned cooperative).
I can list the biggest one without having to look: Because the most popular alternative has progressively gotten worse for the past 12 years, and what was once a quality OS (sure,it had its faults and flaws, but I’ll concede that Win7 was objectively a good OS) has now morphed into a combination of spyware and adware.
I get the sense that Microsoft doesn’t care about their desktop users and as much as views desktop as another small side market.
MacOS only runs on their particular hardware, so Linux is free to gobble up market share limited mainly by user technical know how and the general shift to most web traffic coming from mobile.
Also the updates situation has caused many to dislike Windows.
Linux is a perfectly viable OS at this point, it’s not just for tech geeks. I did have a problem with my USB Wi-Fi adapter during the install but other than that everything was just as smooth and less creepy than Microsoft.
what was once a quality OS (sure,it had its faults and flaws, but I’ll concede that Win7 was objectively a good OS) has now morphed into a combination of spyware and adware.
The last objectively good Microsoft OS that didn’t have any significant user-hostile features was Windows 2000, IMO
Hard agree. Windows 2000 was rock solid, reasonably lightweight and had no shenanigans going on in the background. It’s EOL (edit: actually I think it might have been a specific version of directx only being supported on XP maybe) was one of the things that pushed me to Linux.
Okay, let me rephrase for you: in choosing which of Microsoft’s stinking piles of shit was the least stinky, some people chose Windows 2000. However, most people just left the stinky area and didn’t look back.
Windows 2000 was a good operating system by any measure. It was rock solid, capable, well-supported, could scale from desktop to large enterprise deployments and everything in between, reasonably secure compared to their previous operating systems, etc. I never did like Microsoft operating systems, but Windows 2000 was actually good. It was a breath of fresh air at the time. We had NT 4, which was stable and reliable, but was limited by a lack of DirectX and became cumbersome in large deployments. Then we had Windows 95/98/ME, which was the garbage that crashed all the time.
Besides the backported bullshit from windows 10 (which could be removed, admittedly, you’d have to know it was there, and which package to uninstall…so not exactly newbie friendly), what was hostile about windows 7?
I used it from release day until EOL and I found it to be the best version of windows ever and the pinnacle of the platform, before it started taking a hard drive with Windows 8 and fell off the cliff with 10/11.
Windows 10/11 is why I’m on linux now, and on linux to stay.
Besides the backported bullshit… what was hostile about windows 7?
“Activation,” same as XP and Vista. That’s why I said 2000 was the last “good” version with no hostile features at all: it was the last version (except for ME, which wasn’t “good”) that didn’t require activation.
I’m running it on my daily driver / gaming rig to learn its flaws and how to work around them, because work may be moving that direction. My hardware, my license, not like they can stop me.
I’ve never had more problems with any OS than 11 on day to day stability issues. Vista? At least it had direct X 10. 8? Yeah, a total design fuck up, but even supporting it professionally I never had this many problems.
Looking back on it, Vista got a lot of hate but I don’t think my experience was that bad. It was really annoying with user account control permissions but honestly as a proto 7 it did okay. Compared to 11 I kind of miss it.
“How about subscribing to your own computer? Not now? Ok, see you in a bit.” Even the Windows fans are full of resentment that they have to know which magic numbers to type under which registry entries to actually disable the constant ad screens. And then Windows restores the nag on updates.
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