Yes, but that works just as readily on consoles as it does PCs, so it doesn’t affect immutable Steam any more or less than any other gaming steam. Sealed protections are still valuable regardless!
It affects console too, but watch game publishers disable linux support, blaming cheaters while producing graphs that don't support their arguments. While console packs and cheats are rampant, and their game servers even being hacked during competition.
If the status quo doesn’t change, then you’ll be right to have claimed here that the status quo you’ve described won’t change. But that would be worse for all of us. Besides, Linux is an excellent platform for modding games in realtime, no matter what their charts show — so certainly the sealed-attestation stuff would deny them a plausible reason to deny Linux. If Microsoft offered sealed Windows for free, they’d deny unsealed Windows as fast as humanly possible, just to stem the tide of software cheating. The next couple years will be very interesting :)
I totally agree with you, and I hope the status quo will change. But I'm still skeptical after the Steam Deck success where many games enabled anti cheat, but some did roll back like I said previously.
Attestation could help, but I'm not sure if it goes in the spirit of what Valve tries to do with their OS. The system is open and you can easily access the desktop (it's a first party feature) and thus do what you want. Maybe with a separate verified boot state without desktop but the user experience would not be great.
And in the end, like you said, they'd run to only support sealed attested systems if they could. But cheats have evolved past being run on the computer running the game. Some use DMA or are in between the keyboard/mouse and the usb port. Consoles also have their fair share of cheaters. None of those would be solved by attestation.
Valve has shown recently that it's possible to fight cheaters without kernel AC or attestation. It's just a bit more difficult and intensive so other AC providers won't go the same route.
For good reason, anticheat on linux are basically useless. Not that cheating isn't rampant on other platforms, but you don't have to leave the door open on purpose.
Not really. On linux you can just load your cheat as a kernel module and its undetectable by userspace anticheat.
On windows with kernel anti cheat you would need to find some vulnerable driver, sign your own driver, or use external cheats like DMA or vision based. This funnels cheat devs into using a few methods that anti cheat devs can focus on for detection. Is it perfect? Clearly not as there's plenty of cheaters anyway. But its much more effective than what these anti cheats can do on linux.
Precisely. And this is where secure boot + attestation comes in: making Linux able to prove itself as unmodded to the server, makes it a possible target for multiplayer game developers.
