If I played any Rockstar games, I’d be unhappy with their new anti-cheat too, since it needlessly blocks linux, but this isn’t the way this should be protested. If anything, this probably validates their decision.

The way this should be protested is to just stop playing. Stop giving them money. Stop boosting their month active user numbers that they can flaunt to investors. Hit them financially, since it’s the only hit they really care about. There’s a sea of other high-quality games you can play instead.

@[email protected] @[email protected], a Respawn employee responded on reddit and wants a list of user IDs/gamertags for those banned on linux:

https://www.reddit.com/r/apexlegends/comments/1fi77vs/comment/lnh13kj/?context=8

Looks like you’re not the only one:

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1f5kyd1/psa_using_proton_experimental_or_at_least/

https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1ffxfjb/apex_legends_proton_epic_bug_that_do_that/

They’ve falsely banned linux players before, once in March 2023 and August 2023.

I got hit in the Aug 2023 ban, and had my permaban overturned after 1-2 weeks. Expect to have your appeal rejected, we had to make enough of a fuss about it to get a community manager to reach out to the development team to get people unbanned:

https://www.reddit.com/r/apexlegends/comments/15uqt7w/linux_users_getting_falsely_banned_again/

https://answers.ea.com/t5/Technical-Issues/Linux-players-getting-banned/td-p/12338557/page/50

I haven’t played in 9-10 months since the false positive put a really bad taste in my mouth, so I don’t have any datapoints to add for the current state of things, but I wish you the best of luck getting unbanned.

I had a very similar issue with Heroic Games Launcher (streaming to steam link, steam shortcut added, game thought I was using mouse and keyboard instead of controller). I fixed it by enabling “minimize heroic on game launch” in Heroic’s options. Maybe see if something similar exists for Lutris

For the lazy, three of his kids died before 30:

• Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain: died at 75y/o (heart attack)
• Wife Olivia Langdon Clemens: died at 58y/o (heart failure)
• Son Langdon Clemens: died at 19 months (diptheria)
• Daughter Suzy Clemens: died at 24y/o (spinal meningitis)
• Daughter Clara Clemens: died at 88y/o (likely overdose)
• Daughter Jean Clemens: died at 29y/o (drowned in bathtub after epileptic seizure)

Worth noting the life expectancy when Mark Twain was born was about 60-65, so he did outlive the average by 10-15 years. But this is still more due to his children having tragic deaths rather than his longevity.

It’s a shooter with no aim assist, and the UI isn’t setup particularly well for controller (at least not yet)

Valve has manually selected the game to be run with proton experimental under linux, and it works on my linux desktop. So it will probably at least run on Deck, but I don’t imagine it’s a very controller-friendly game. I have no idea about Mac.

Yes, a lot of games work fine without precompiled shaders. Others, like Apex Legends or Rocket League, are a complete mess (at least for the first few minutes of gameplay - it used to be much worse but DXVK 2.0 helped a lot with this). You’ve probably just only tried the games that work fine.

“Having to deal with pre-shader work” that you mentioned is a good thing. Without it, games will stutter more. And you always have the option to skip it or disable it entirely.

But otherwise, it’s a classic delimma:

A surprising amount of games support linux anti-cheat now: https://areweanticheatyet.com

Oculus does not work, but that’s expected for a Facebook product… Valve Index and HTC Vive work pretty good. I’ve personally played 5-10 VR games on linux with an Index I borrowed from a friend

Revolt is certainly better than Discord’s privacy, but since it doesn’t yet have E2EE, it doesn’t seem like very privacy-focused software

Oh nice! Although, one issue from their website:

“Every message and file gets sent separately to every member in the group”

That seems fine for small groups, but for the typical Element crowd of large groups, I don’t think that would go over well. If you send a 10MB file in a 2000-person chat, you’d be uploading 20GB of data…

Just a quick glance at all of those:

-Briar, Tox, and Cwtch don’t have iOS clients

-SimpleX doesn’t have a desktop GUI has issues with big groups (see comment below)

-Session has a 100-person group chat limit

-Syphon’s own github states they are “still in alpha and we do not recommend using it where proven and independently verified security is required.” Plus, they haven’t had a release in over a year, so I’m not sure it’s still maintained.

Element (or most Matrix clients) don’t have any of those issues. Like I said, it’s not perfect, but I see why it’s recommended. All decent alternatives have significant downsides

Element isn’t perfect, but what’s a better alternative? A giant Signal group would be a horrible idea, since everyone’s phone numbers would be exposed to the other members (plus there’s a 150 group member limit), and Discord is obviously much worse than Element (from a privacy perspective).

Through proton, yes. The game has always worked with anti-cheat disabled (so no PvP multiplayer), but proton-compatible anti-cheat has been supported since early April, so all multiplayer functionality has worked since then.

This article is referring to a recent MCC patch that broke proton anti-cheat for about a week, thankfully it’s fixed now.

Well Respawn explicitly enabling Easy Anti-Cheat’s Proton support (plus the game being Steam Deck Verified) is about as official as we’re gonna get for the vast majority of multiplayer games. I think it’s more of an issue around EA firing 99% of their QA testers…

Considering less than a month ago they were making headlines for mistakenly banning linux players (but eventually unbanning them, thankfully), makes me wonder how many of those bans are false-positives.

I was one of the linux players who was banned. It took them about 8 days for them to unban me in-game, and then it took another week for my EA ban history to change from “active” to “overturned,” with an email from EA. No apology, no sort of in-game compensation, just basically a “be thankful you can play again.”

~25% of the linux players are still banned. Some definitely cheated, some I would be shocked if they cheated, just considering the amount of hours and money they had put into their account, along with how enthusiastic they were about getting themselves (and others) unbanned. So shocked that I’m almost certain they’re false positives. Which makes me hesitant to keep playing - what if that happens to me? If they treat their Steam Deck and linux users this way, is that a game I really want to support?

More info from the article: quality mode is 1440p 30fps, and performance mode is 960p (upscaled to 1440p using FSR2) 60fps. Although late-game, specifically the big cities in act 3, can dip into mid-20fps range

It’s possible they want to support Steam Deck without supporting the rest of linux desktop, which would just be… dumb. The Steam Deck, in Valve’s own words, is “just a PC” anyway.

Considering they unbanned all most of the linux users last time though, this is likely just another mistake.

It’s currently at 10% positive reviews. I think once this chart updates in ~11.5 hrs, it will officially be the worst-reviewed steam game of all time: https://steam250.com/bottom100