And that definition depends on how you define “benefitting the user”. If someone has an online match ruined by a hacker, I’d argue that they would have benefitted from the game running some kind of anticheat.
Do we define user as the singular individual person? Or do we consider the user as a collective, and factor in the larger benefit to the masses? It could even be argued that the people running cheats are the ones running malware (specifically, malware that targets the other users in the match) and should therefore be treated the same way we treat people who use more traditional viruses and trojans at the detriment to others. The same way you wouldn’t want some virus-ridden machine connecting to your home network, (you’d probably want everyone to at least be running a basic virus scanner and have common sense when browsing,) you would want everyone in the game running anticheat to ensure there is no malware.
Very few people would say that it’s okay to waste others’ time and computer resources on a bitcoin miner trojan… Most people would (correctly) determine that it is theft. But then when it comes to online games, the same people feel entitled to waste other peoples’ time and computer resources by ruining their matches.
That’s largely a corporate decision that is out of the hands of the programmers. Generally speaking, security specialists would agree with you. But running anticheat on the server costs server resources, which means you need more servers to accommodate the same number of players. Running it client-side is a cost cutting measure mandated by the corporate bean counters who did the math and concluded it’d be cheaper for the company to spend the users’ computer resources instead.
While I agree that client-side security isn’t the best solution, it’s certainly better than no solution. It’s the same argument people have against self-driving cars. The self-driving cars don’t need to be perfect; They just need to be better than the average driver. If they can reduce the number and severity of accidents that are currently happening without them, then they should be implemented. Even if the solution isn’t perfect. Because an imperfect solution is better than doing nothing at all.
You’re right and it’s a pragmatic approach to the problem. They only need broad technical effectiveness to change user behaviour.
I’d argue that it’s not strictly cost cutting but cost transferring. The total client resources most likely exceed that which would be needed on servers.
I don’t think that is a widely accepted holistic definition of malware. But even if, AC is not waisting resources. It’s taking the resources it needs to perform its job.
There are several forms of anticheat. The ones that just run when the game is running, is usually fine. However, there is the Riot anti cheat which just runs all the time and isn’t uninstalled when Valorant is uninstalled. That is malware.
You’ve linked to their anti cheat which they also offer but it’s not their main product. Funny that you missed that, given that you were already on their web site and irdeto.com/denuvo/ spells out “Anti-Piracy technology” in huge font:
There are games with single player and multiplayer modes that come with anti cheat. I had some game a few months ago that was a Steam freebie (can’t remember the name) whose anti cheat didn’t install properly on Windows and it didn’t allow me to launch regular single player, only mod mode.
According to them ~58% of anti-cheat games work. There’s been a large uptick of anti-cheat support since the Steam Deck.
According to ProtonDB, 86% of the top 1000 games on Steam function (Silver+ rating). It’s a pretty safe bet that the most of the missing 14% is probably due to anti-cheat.
If you want to game, stick to regular Fedora. A project that is actually secure is ublue with dedicated NVIDIA images that should just work and never break, and they even have Bazzite, an Image specifically for the Steamdeck but also for Desktop.
These images are only ½ day behind upstream, apply minimal additions and patches (like drivers, codecs, packages, udev rules for controllers) and Nick from the video above found out that the Nobara patches with their weird less supported Kernel arent really worth the hassle.
I 100% agree, its best to just stick to upstream Fedora imo. Glad you made this comment. The security issues of Nobara always put me off, especially since basically everything it does can just be applied to regular Fedora. I think Nobara would much better serve as a script or toolkit, similar to Brace, or something along those lines instead of an entire separate OS with the security issues it brings.
Proprietary UEFI BIOS is, but for a secure system with local manipulation prevention it can be needed. Also secureboot is a security measurement against malware so no, its simply the best we have.
Look at Coreboot if you want a secure modern system
The vulnerability actually isn’t in Windows Boot Manager, it’s a flaw in the image-parsing code of the UEFI itself. That’s why it’s able to bypass SecureBoot.
It just happens that for whatever reason you can easily update the image file from within Windows/Linux itself. The fact they don’t show a logo currently does not mean you’re immune, as the system might just be showing a black screen at that point. Code can be injected into an image file without perceptibly affecting the image output, so you’d likely be able to use a “black screen” logo. If your computer has a UEFI instead of a BIOS, which is pretty much everything from the last 10yrs, then you are more than likely at risk.
My computer likely isn’t susceptible, and that’s because it’s a Dell workstation. While the bug still exists in the image parser, Dell has locked things down so it’s pretty much impossible to change the boot logo from userspace.
That’s a good reply. Reading the other replies, I realized that great runtime is very different for everyone. I wouldn’t consider 5-7 hours great. More like absolute minimum 8. Better is 10-12. This sounds very unlikely though, apart from MacBooks with ARM CPU.
The T480 and T580 are some of the last ones they made with swapable batteries. Everything works out of the box in Linux except the fingerprint scanner which needs some additional configuration.
I have a T480 with an integrated GPU and the largest battery. It runs for a long time on a charge and there are lots of spare parts available.
Just curious, the 72WH battery? What’s a “long time?” I use the standard slim battery on my T480 and was only getting 3-4 hours on Pop (both brand new batteries). And forget about standby. It would regularly lose 20-30% overnight if not completely shut down. Wanted to make it work, but that alone made me boot back into Windows for the laptop.
I still get over 12 hours of web browsing or video playback with the backlight around 30% on mine even though my internal battery is down to 60% capacity and my external is around 90%. Standby drains about 10% overnight. I am running Linux Mint on mine and I set up TLP. Undervolting can increase the runtime quite a bit, but I haven’t bothered with that yet.
Why buy Lenovo even there are a bunch of vendors making Linux-first laptops these days? When you buy Lenovo you’re supporting Microsoft and a bunch of other shady companies (firmware vendors, etc).
I’ve gotten both of my thinkpads used, so none of that money went to Lenovo or Microsoft. The laptops that come with Linux are expensive and are rarely available used.
I’ve had good luck with refurbished Dell laptops. My primary laptop is a refurbished Dell Latitude 11" 3120. Bought it for ~$250 at beginning of this year and currently have Fedora on it. It’s not very powerful. I use it primarily to browse the web, watch movies/tv, and vnc/ssh to my other systems. Can last about 5-6 hours streaming video from jellyfin at 50% brightness, other stuff barely uses any power and can stretch out to 9-10 hours if I set display brightness even lower.
I’ve always bought Windows laptops then put linux on them so I’m used to verifying that tools such as TLP are installed, configured, enabled, and working. There is too much variety with laptops for all of them to be handled automatically unfortunately so I always verify it. If a laptop came with Linux pre-installed then it might be good to go ootb but I’d still verify.
Interesting. 9-10 hours sounds nice! Do you think never ones would have even better runtime? Have you used TLPUI? Maybe with a GUI I could get my self to play around with TLP…
NVIDIA’s Debian repo for Cuda has more up to date GPU drivers, if you don’t wanna manually install from the .run file. Documentation here, its not reflected yet in the docs but there’s a Debian 12 repo.
Next time I look for a small laptop to have handy one thing I’m going to be sure to prioritise is: how much battery does it use while suspended? I’d really like to not need to have it switch to hibernate after 30m of sleep or w/e and ideally just plug it in overnight like a phone.
I won’t buy a laptop without it. My earlier Dell Precision had it, but under warranty they ended up replacing it for a slightly “better” model, because the damage from the swollen battery was too hard to repair. I hate the new one. I have to make this 64gig laptop hibernate to get close to what I had with S3 sleep… but it’s nowhere near instant. I hate them for doing that to me. And this newer laptop (Precision 5550) keeps losing screws and it has stray clicks from the chassis flexing when you try to pick it up. Miss the old one. Think it was a 5540.
I was about to say the same. I usually run Dell XPS or Macs. The good thing about Macs is that the sleep modes and stuff all work really really well. The XPSs are solid, and the hardware support in Linux is pretty good.
A notable third entry recent entry for me is framework. Customizable, upgradable and not too expensive (when compared to the other two), it’s a great option.
I looked into them. And it sounded a lot of the users are not happy about the build quality compared to Thinkpads or Latitudes. How is your experience? Did you go with Intel or AMD?
Build quality on Frameworks is dramatically better than most ThinkPads. They've made a lot of improvements to battery life since the first generation (I got mine in the second batch), so it might have decent battery life now. They've always been more efficient on Linux than on Windows.
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