this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2025
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It isn't. Cheating is a game culture problem, not a technical problem. Just to counter example. Rust is filled with cheaters precisely because they haven't done everything they can to fix cheating. They are culturally fixated in a single lane thinking. As a result, they're flooded with cheaters (plenty on Windows) who exploit their inflexible strategies. This is top Flanders "we haven't done anything and we are all out of ideas". Linux is not the source of cheating on Rust either, but he's arguing as if it is. He is lazy. That's not bad on itself, but he is also disingenuous and is arguing in bad faith.
Make server side anti cheat and suddenly what OS the player is running becomes irrelevant.
Edit: another contradiction in their argument. Linux was less than 0.1% of the Rust user base. But, Linux was also the biggest source of cheating? How? It is just a disingenuous and dumb argument made to spite Linux out of hatred. It has no basis in reality.
To adress your edit first. That's not what he said. He said the majority of Linux users are cheaters, not that the majority of cheaters are on Linux.
If you want to be upset about things people say, at least understand what they're saying...
I don't think you're a programmer. I don't think you've worked on the backend of software. It's seldom as easy as "just fix it". All software are built in blocks, added over time. Sometimes, it's not until much later you realise one of the blocks are unstable. But it's not as easy as just replacing the block. You'll have to dismantle everything built above it, reconstruct the entire block, and then build everything back up. Sometimes from scratch, because while you're at it, might as well fix some other issues too.
It's a massive undertaking, can take a very long time. And while you're doing all of that. You don't have time for anything else.
What he is saying, is that they're currently fighting enough cheaters on Windows as it is, they don't have time to do it on Linux either, all while maintaining two codebases instead of one.
Now. I don't play rust. Just not my cup of tea. But it's silly, how many comments here either don't even understand the argument he's making (including yourself) and/or have no understanding what so ever of what software development on projects decades old actually entail.
It's so funny how you say they don't care about their creative work at all, because in my experience. You'd have to care a lot about the project to justify the headache of maintaining decade old codebases. It's seldom fun. We're talking months of headache for a single day of gratification. And then it starts all over.
He's saying that cheaters who probably play on Windows, used hooks dedicated for Linux/Proton to bypass anti-cheat code.
That is not at all what is said. The guy you're replying to is also wrong. Alistair only claimed most of Linux users were cheaters, that would be 0.005%, not that most of total cheaters were on Linux. But that means during their all time steam player count peak (which was after the Linux ban) if 260k players, a total of about 13 people were cheating on Linux.
Which contradicts his position that cheating is a massive huge front to wage an endless war on. 13 people is a ban list, not a cry for rootkits on all clients. It stands to reason that if Linux was 0.01% and even if they were all cheating, it is not a massive problem. Is it tiny or is it massive? It can't be both at the same time.
Every extra cheater is a bad thing.
Do you think a player would care they only make up x% of the playerbase when they get insta killed through walls and lose all their resources by someone in god mode?
Of course any one cheater is bad. But this is a massively successful game studio complaining about cheating when they admit to not putting any resources towards creating a team to combat cheating.