this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2025
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Stuff like this has been coming for a while now, and I hate it. See also how your windows login screen can have ads on it.
Considering the rate of return on advertisements, I don't think this is a financially good sign.
And interestingly a friend of mine who basically only games switched to Linux, and it seemed to have been rather painless. And most of his games work with minimal fiddling. (And there are even tools to help you with 'which games of my library will not run well'. Which did surprisingly well on his large library. So linux on the desktop might be closer than we think).
It's unfortunate that Linux is not immune to this. I noticed this happening to Firefox on a Linux machine and there was the debacle with Amazon search in Ubuntu's menu about a decade ago. It seems a lot less endemic, though.
I'd hope that on linux annoyed users would easily hack it out, compared to stuff like windows. But sadly that is also expecting active users who can do coding and then can/want to spread that code, and then being able to trust that code. I have seen in other places how much of a mess that can be.
There certainly are users, both on Windows and Linux who do "hack out" these things. With Firefox it can range from just going through the small hassle of unticking the sponsor option in settings to making forks like the LibreWolf which people seem to like. When the Ubuntu Amazon thing was ongoing I recall people switching desktop environments and even distros in protest and for Windows I know people who hunt elusive enterprise only versions or even Chinese market editions of the OS to avoid the ads.
I usually appreciate it when distros avoid fucking with the upstream versions of the software they package, so in the occasional case like this where the upstream decides to ship a shitty "feature" I would actually prefer being patched out by the distro package maintainers, I don't mind accepting the responsibility of just turning off the setting or compiling a fork on my own if necessary.
Linux gaming has come a really long way. I use Bazzite^[https://bazzite.gg/] on a Steam Deck and it's great.
The only real remaining hurdle, I think, is that some companies insist on anti-cheat software without Linux support. Mostly because they're too lazy to implement it server-side, I am guessing. This is why you can't play Fortnite (that one with the dancing and the bullets) on Linux.
You can't prevent client-side cheating with a server-side implementation. For instance, making enemies on the other side of a wall visible uses data that the server has to supply to the client in order for the game to work, just in an unintended way. The server also has no way to verify whether the client is accurately conveying the results of user inputs or gently correcting them to move the aim to an enemy's head instead of a gazebo.
It would still be nice if all game companies supported Linux, but it requires active effort and isn't something they can get for free by being better programmers.
the annoying thing is that anticheat engines do support linux, but some companies don't want to deal with it at all
Server can absolutely prevent wall hacks. It just adds a lot of computation cost and induces more latency.