A place to discuss and support all things Steam Deck.
Replacement for r/steamdeck_linux.
As Lemmy doesn't have flairs yet, you can use these prefixes to indicate what type of post you have made, eg:
[Flair] My post title
The following is a list of suggested flairs:
[Discussion] - General discussion.
[Help] - A request for help or support.
[News] - News about the deck.
[PSA] - Sharing important information.
[Game] - News / info about a game on the deck.
[Update] - An update to a previous post.
[Meta] - Discussion about this community.
Some more Steam Deck specific flairs:
[Boot Screen] - Custom boot screens/videos.
[Selling] - If you are selling your deck.
These are not enforced, but they are encouraged.
Rules:
Now punish publishers who try to change the terms of sale after sale. “Want to play the single player game you bought a decade ago? Agree to this new arbitration clause.”
Include adding kernel level anti cheat to that. This should just give us an option to get a full refund.
It should only be applicable to new sales. Old sales should function the same as before.
It's horrifying to me that any of these fucking games are running outside userspace. Is anti cheat the only reason why that is necessary? Why is it necessary for anti cheat?
Running in the kernel let's anti-cheat see everything on your computer, let's devs take screenshots or videos of your screen, and let's the anti-cheat reinstall itself if the user tries to remove it. It also lets the developers secretly install additional software if needed for some reason. Overall it's pretty effective at being able to catch user space cheat programs, the catch is that you're permanently compromising the security and privacy of your computer, and nothing short of a full disk purge will guarantee it's actually been uninstalled.
The other catch is it's can still be defeated by kernel-level cheat programs, which are now widely available thanks to the rise of kernel anti-cheat. It also can't do anything about cheat programs that run on external hardware, such as aimbots that just look at your video feed and simulate mouse inputs to aim.
So it really comes down to how bothered you are by cheaters in your games, and if you're willing to give up your privacy and security to make it slightly more inconvenient for those cheaters to cheat.
I should probably mention some notable downsides to kernel anti-cheat as well:
Because kernel anti-cheat has full access to your PC, if any virus/etc can take advantage of a security vulnerability in the anti-cheat program, it gains absolute access to your PC.
Kernel anti-cheat needs special signing keys to get access to the kernel, but the more companies that get access to the keys the more likely it is to have compromised keys. Genshin impacts keys were compromised and used to sign ransomware, giving it full kernel access on any computers it was able to get on.
Devs have used kernel anti-cheat to secretly install Bitcoin miners on users machines
Kernel anti-cheat can be compromised and used to directly gain control of a users PC. Some apex legends streamers had their PCs compromised and cheats installed remotely through their anti-cheat during a tournament.
A lot of anti-cheat programs are created by Chinese companies or companies that are mostly owned by Chinese companies. China is well known for spying on users, and there's a ban on a lot of Chinese hardware due to spying concerns and backdoors that the Chinese government requires to be in their devices. I think the invasive nature of kernel anti-cheat makes it an obvious spying platform, and I think it's absurd to think that any anti-cheat coming from China isn't actively spying on you.
I'd like to see it show if there is any third party DRM as well, like the Augmented Steam extension does.