I was thinking about the anti-cheat scenario and this popped on my mine. Consider the following scenario.

Valve comes out with an alternate OS for the Steam Deck called “Steam OS Secure” which supports anti-cheats. Special proprietary blobs were added to the OS, in collaboration with the game devs, which allow it to monitor metrics at the kernel level. These anti-cheats will only be able to run on an unmodified Steam Deck which gets disabled the moment you “modify” your Deck.

(I’m unsure what “modify” means here. Maybe if the user creates a root password or if a new layer has been added on top of SteamOS)

This will come pre-installed with the Deck (Steam Deck 3 maybe), but a seperate OS without the proprietary blobs is also available and can be downloaded/installed right from the Deck itself. This can be switched anytime but it’s a lengthy procedure. Obviously, the one without the anti-cheat performs better.

What do you think about this? Would you approve this? Will your perception towards Valve change? Will it be better for gaming over all?

Edit: I can understand the dislikes. No one wants RING-0 anti-cheat on Linux. But I just want to have a discussion on this. I don’t see game devs making exceptions their game only on Linux in the near future.

    • xavier666@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      7·
      1 month ago

      With secure boot, combined with a signed kernel and initramfs, and basic TPM keys, every official Steam Deck can have full hardware attestation the same way mobile phones and some laptops do. This, combined with existing anti cheat solutions, can work to detect cheating.

      This. We already have a secure environment for gaming. At this point, it’s essentially better than what Windows is offering. The only reason game devs carefully ignore this issue is because of market share.