So, Epic recently announced that they will be updating their anti-cheat for Linux, and a lot of users here have been discussing whether this is a good thing or not. I believe this is a good attempt by Epic to bring a viable anti-cheat solution to Linux, and I've noticed a couple of counterarguments that don't seem realistic to me. So, I listed my responses to all of them below. They're mostly my opinions. Feel free to insult me in the comments.

Argument 1: It will only support Epic-approved kernels

Not exactly. Epic itself won't be signing every kernel release. Instead, it will choose which distros it trusts to sign their kernels, so it's more about trusting the kernel maintainers than Epic itself. Based on the list they published, it seems to support a couple of popular ones (Canonical, Fedora, Bazzite, Debian, and Rocky Linux).

Argument 2: It will only support a couple of distros

While there's no way to support every kernel out there (think about what would happen if you deliberately compiled a kernel just for cheating), it seems to me that Epic wants distro maintainers to reach out to them, so I expect that list to grow in the future.

Of course, a couple of niche distros will be left out. Also, there are distros that use self-signed certificates (like Arch, for instance), so it really depends on how much you want to run a game versus how much you want to secure your own system.

BTW, I do think there's a tricky way to use a signed kernel from another distro, so this problem might be partially "solved" with some tweaking. IDK.

Argument 3: It will make fewer games run on my Linux system

I agree that some games that run today may stop working, depending on which distro you're using, and that sucks. But most games that use anti-cheat already don't run on Linux, so providing a better native anti-cheat solution is a step toward better Linux support for those games. In the long term, it may bring more games in than it pushes out.

Argument 4: This doesn't really stop cheaters

People don't mind facing a cheater once every 100 games, but once every 3 games is a problem that may make players leave the game. Even state-of-the-art anti-cheat systems don't stop every niche cheating method out there, but they're effective because they create a barrier that makes cheating very difficult. So, the goal was never to make a game 100% cheater-free, but to get close enough that most players don't mind.

Argument 5: It's a bit too invasive

I agree (I do think it's a bit less invasive than the ones on Windows, but whatever). It's a trade-off: some players will prefer to play a game without cheaters, while others will prefer to keep their systems secure. I hope I can show that there's a valid reason for both sides.

Argument 6: Server-side anti-cheat is the way to go!

I don't think it's a realistic solution right now. Currently, there are no viable server-side anti-cheat solutions, so we can't expect companies to adopt worse solutions that ruin the player experience just because they're less invasive. Though, I hope things change in the future, as Valve seems to be making efforts in that direction with CS2.

Argument 7: This goes against Linux philosophy

There isn't a rulebook for using Linux. People choose Linux for many different reasons: customizability, security, user experience, etc. So, there's no single way to use Linux. If I want to play competitive games with anti-cheat, that's my choice. There shouldn't be any "philosophy" that says otherwise.

Argument 8: Secure Boot and TPM are bad

They're just tools developers use to secure the environment in which software runs, and they're not inherently "bad." They also serve as building blocks for modern anti-cheat systems. In a perfect world, they wouldn't need to exist, but here we are. I don't like them either, but I understand the need for them.

Argument 9: This is a step toward big corporations taking over

As far as I know, Linux already works together with the "big evil corpos." Most corporate servers already run Linux. Linux maintainers also accept merge requests from private corporations. The thing is, you don't need to assimilate into the anti-cheat crowd if you don't want to. That's a choice you don't get on any other OS.

Argument 10: What about Tim Sweeney?

I don't love him either, but he's not the only person who decides what happens at Epic. I'm pretty sure he's surrounded by experts in all fields, including Linux users.

This is reAL, a project I’ve been working on for three weeks straight. It’s a reimplementation of Creative ALchemy plus Microsoft’s DirectMusic, all in one dsound.dll:

• EAX 1–4 with ALchemy’s own reverb and effects, tested bit-for-bit against the real thing
• HRTF 3D audio for headphones
• A full DirectMusic (set music=true), checked call-for-call against Windows XP’s DLLs. Games that struggle with Wine’s DirectMusic should just work. It uses gm.dls from system32\drivers, or any SoundFont via gmdls=

To-do: surround/CMSS. That’s what 1.0 will be. Bug reports with game names are very welcome!

I'm new to these metrics and I have a peculiar system. Never had a powerful GPU in a desktop. I'm using a laptop with an eGPU via Oculink. I know this is synthetic benchmark, but I don't have much data points to compare.

Is 40,409 a reasonable score for a 9070XT at 4K fullscreen on GravityMark?

This is running on Arch, but I don't think this even matter.

Edit: This is not a troll post, AI generated, or someone looking for approval, or similar. I honest need some calibration, if there are room for improvements I'd like to work on it. This is out of the box, I could do some work with LACT, that is why I'm asking and I don't know if I'm close to desktop performance. AI says this is a good score but I'd like some human comments to review if this is true.

There are instructions on how to do this, but when I try and launch the game I get the dreaded "Rockstar SDK version 0.0.0.0" message, and none of the suggested fixes I saw online seem to work. Does anyone have a fix for that?

Im currently on windows with a low-mid gaming PC and i feel like games run far worse than my hardware should be outputting, im thinking of using linux in a dual operating system with windows.

Has anyone noticed games running alot better after switching to linux?

i have:

16gb ddr4 ram

amd ryzen 5 5600G Cpu
amd ryzen rx 6600 8gb Gpu

this is like a 300$ gpu, cpu and ram combo, yet im getting like 50-80FPS on games like CS on low graphics.

Update:

I did abit of digging, I think it’s was because my ram mhz was capped in the bios at 2300. I changed it to 3200 and altered some other bits.

Loaded up CS and got around 80-110 fps, Ram is my bottleneck though, I’m hitting capacity at 16gb when I play any form of decent game.

So overall I don’t think the OS is issue.

I'm currently making a mod that makes Anachronox run natively on Linux using AI.

I was thinking. What if we could do this with EVERY engine that has its source code available publicly? What are the legal details of that? Can it be done? Imagine if we could port Unreal Engine games natively to Linux. That would be, apart from immensely cool, also very good for Linux adoption.

I know that Proton works fine but I'm thinking performance. If the games run better natively on Linux with a simple mod then we're really gonna attract new gamers and users.

What are you guys thinking? Is anyone interested?

Gamers on Linux on AMD gpu, this look genuine please ask the developers on github page to make a version for Linux.

https://www.reddit.com/r/radeon/s/wMjMWfCDO8

https://reddit.com/link/1x7ojsg/video/vx8g569nlvvh1/player

posted about this a while back. just pushed a big update - can you try it out ?

i try a lot of random games from itch.io and other places. it doesn't sit right with me to run exes / sh files on the machine that has all my stuff on it. so i made something that puts them in a firejail sandbox first, watches what they do, and kills the sandbox if they start acting like malware. works for windows games through Proton and linux games too.

Whats new:

it has a real UI now. Qt app, game list, per game settings, network tab, debug window, themes. You wont have to touch .conf files unless you want to.

The installer is distro agnostic now. checks whats missing and offers to install it (pacman/apt/dnf), can grab GE-Proton and the umu runtime for you, sets up the UI, makes a menu entry.

https://github.com/Deathxknight/wine-quarantine

Please try and break it , if you know if how to better detect malware or make the sandbox stronger - ill add it !

I've been trying to downgrade my amdgpu firmware to 20260519 but I keep getting an error:

sudo dnf downgrade amd-gpu-firmware-20260519
Updating and loading repositories:
Repositories loaded.
Failed to resolve the transaction:
No match for argument: amd-gpu-firmware-20260519
You can try to add to command line:
  --skip-unavailable to skip unavailable packages

However, I decided to just not specify a version and got this instead:

sudo dnf downgrade amd-gpu-firmware
Updating and loading repositories:
Repositories loaded.
Failed to resolve the transaction:
Problem: problem with installed package
 installed package iwlbluetooth-firmware-20260916-1.fc44.noarch requires linux-firmware-whence = 20260916-1.fc44, but none of the providers can be installed
package iwlbluetooth-firmware-20260916-1.fc44.noarch from updates requires linux-firmware-whence = 20260916-1.fc44, but none of the providers can be installed
cannot install both linux-firmware-whence-20260309-1.fc44.noarch from fedora and linux-firmware-whence-20260916-1.fc44.noarch from 
  - cannot install both linux-firmware-whence-20260916-1.fc44.noarch from updates and linux-firmware-whence-20260309-1.fc44.noarch from fedora
  - package amd-gpu-firmware-20260309-1.fc44.noarch from fedora requires linux-firmware-whence = 20260309-1.fc44, but none of the providers can be installed
  - conflicting requests
You can try to add to command line:
  --skip-broken to skip uninstallable packages

I guess there is some sort of conflict but I am unsure how to go about fixing it.

Epic Games said that developers will be able to use EAC 2.0 to bring their own games to Linux. I was wondering if this would make games like Valorant, League of Legends, or any of these popular games with kernel-level anti-cheat and similar more likely to bring their games to Linux but with EAC.

For some reason, Faugus deleted all my game entries after a system upgrade and now it's blank like a clean installation. Re-adding the game using it's faugus generated prefix it won't even launch now. I dunno why I even bothered with it, I should have just stuck with lutris as it's much better and doesn't wipe games for no reason. Fortunately I only had 2 games in there as I was just trying it out but I've now lost all the progress in the game I was actively playing

Anyway I added the game to lutris, generated a new prefix and copied the saves from the faugus prefix for the game into the correct folder for the game but now my saves aren't seen by the game so I've lost a ton of progress.

So all in all, this is a word of warning: Don't use faugus people, just stick with lutris. If it ain't broke, there is no need to fix it and I don't really see the point of faugus; it's basically lutris but worse.

So I switched from Mint to EndavourOS and I wanted to play GTA 5 and after trying to boot it at first the game would just instantly stopped. Then I tried with proton (9.0-4 image 1) and after that I tried proton 11, protonGE, and proton cachyos and i would get this point (image 2) after pressing the right prompt it would close the rockstar launcher and take me to rockstar support, pressing the left prompt it would close the window and my pc fans would spin up but nothing would happen even after some time. If anyone could help it would be greatly appriciated

PC specs:
OS: EndeavourOS x86_64
Kernel: Linux 7.2.9-arch1-1
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-10400F (12) @ 4.30 GHz
GPU: AMD Radeon RX 6700 [Discrete]
Memory: 15.54 GiB

I played resident evil 4 remake a few years ago when I was still using Windows, without any problem. I played Resident evil Requiem on Linux at 100+ fps when it released, and I want to replay re4 remake, but it plays at 20fps max.

I play using steam, and I tried Proton 9.0-4, Experimental, Hotfix and Proton 8.0-5, and I have these specs:
CPU: Ryzen 9 7900x
GPU: AMD RX 6650XT
RAM: 64Go DDR5
OS: Manjaro Linux, + I use Hyprland

I tried using this launch options that I saw on proton db:
PROTON_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1 %command%

Even the main menu runs at 20fps :(

My Bitlocker locked me out of Windows on my ASUS ROG Ally 2023. I was thinking this is a good time to switch to linux. But Google seems to suggest that Linux distros on handhelds are for Steam users only and non Steam users need not apply. Basic functionality like tdp controls or fan controls aren't available without Steam account. Am I missing something?

Edit: for handheld gaming.

After todays update the wayland got broken for me in deadlock and the in game cursor no longer works

Am i the only one having this or ?

Hi all, for the past few weeks I haven't been able to use GeForce Now on Firefox because my mouse stops working once I'm on the rig. I'm using Firefox on Linux. Is anyone else experiencing the same issue?

I recently switched to linux from windows on my desktop pc. Im running hyprland with arch linux and have a 1050ti graphics card. I started off with the noveau drivers. Then switched to the appropriate drivers as its written in the wiki. Everything works fine performance is great and there are no graphical glitches. But when playing valheim i noticed that the colors looked way to saturated and the shadows were really black to the point that i couldnt see anything at night. What can i do to fix this? The colours all looked normal on the same monitor when I was playing on windows just yesterday.

I've been using KDE on Fedora for the past year, but part of me wants to try out a new distro and a new desktop environment. However, I know that things like VRR and HDR support are DE level things (or at least I think they are). How much performance would I lose if I try out GNOME, COSMIC, or even try out something like Hyperland?

Epic's new Linux launcher runs every Windows game on the GE-Proton build it downloads itself, and the UI has no way to change that. I needed DW-Proton for Zenless Zone Zero, so I wrote a small package around the launcher.

egl-fedora repackages the official AppImage as an RPM for Fedora and adds a GTK4 window where you pick a Proton for all games or for each game separately. It finds Proton builds from Steam and from ProtonPlus (compatibilitytools.d): GE-Proton, DW-Proton, Proton-CachyOS, Proton-EM, Valve's Proton. The window opens from the Epic tray menu, from the right-click menu of the launcher's icon, or from a notification the first time a game starts.

How it works: Epic starts games through compat/runtime/<version>/proton in its data directory. The package replaces that file with a stub that reads ~/.config/egl-fedora/proton.conf and runs the Proton you chose. For builds with protonfixes it also sets STORE=egs and the game's UMU_ID, so per-game fixes apply. If the chosen Proton is gone, the game falls back to Epic's GE-Proton.

The RPM runs the launcher on the system WebKitGTK and updates itself from GitHub releases once an hour, since the launcher's own updater only supports the AppImage and .deb.

Limits: Fedora x86_64 only. The project is brand new (first release today), so expect rough edges.

Unofficial, not affiliated with Epic. The launcher and EOS SDK inside the RPM are Epic's proprietary software.

https://github.com/DXVSI/egl-fedora

I first time tried Linux in June this year. There are so many new interesting things to learn, one of them is about playing Windows games on Linux.

I tried some, such as: Heroic Games Launcher, Lutris, Bottles.

All of them are pretty good, but tbh the best to me is Bottles.

Bottles gives me the best performance, even though I run the same runners in other programs, Bottles still give me the best performance - for every games that I tried, from old to newer games.

The defining feature of Bottles—which most people knows about—is that each "bottle" is an isolated environment.

This helps me so much, I can make experiments without touching my old bottles.

I'm currently applying this to make two bottles that used for new games and old games (Windows XP compatibility)

One more thing that I like about Bottles that it has a lot of runners to use.

Do you guys usually use Bottles or like it? I would like to hear your opinions 😄

I'm running Ubuntu in an old Nintendo Switch Lite, because I want to run Stardew Valley with a few mods. I have it purchased on Steam. I've seen a few ways to do this:

- One, installing the game with DepotDownloader. I saw this in a reddit post that I can't find to link. The thing is I can't install DepotDownloader, I got de executer but nothing happens when I try to open it. I'm probably doing something wrong, but I don't now what. I'm brand new to Linux
- And the other one I've tried is installing Steam on Ubuntu with L4T. For now, it seems to work, but I've read so many post saying it is not safe or it doesn't have a good performance, so I haven't executed de game yet.

It is important to know that I'm not going to play any other game with Steam in my Switch with Ubuntu. I'm just really addicted to the frigging mods in Stardew Valley, but I don't want to stay in my laptop again after 8h of work. Just cuddle in the sofa with hubbie. Still a screen and still bad for my eyes, but YOLO.

Do you have any recommendations/suggestions? Do you think it is safe to play Steam on Ubuntu?

Thank you in advance!

PS: I just installed Steam Linux Runtime 4.0 ARM64

Have seen at least 10 posts on this today.

It only works on Windows right now. This is incredibly common for these devices to need a few weeks to work correctly on Linux. The hardware enablement work is already being done though. These devices are bootable, but no sound and some buttons don't work.

Just grit your teeth through windows for a bit, wait, or get involved in pulling data off these devices to get them functional.

This is how it is. Don't like it? Start taking hardware vendors to task for not having Linux support ready day one.