Client side anti-cheat is inherently flawed. These games are asking an untrusted computer whether it is cheating. That’s like asking a known liar whether they’re lying at that moment. The one way to make it harder for the computer to “lie” is by increasing the permissions the AC has, which comes at the cost of privacy for people with the game, and security for every Windows user (not just the ones with a certain game installed).

Client side anti-cheat can be poked and investigated locally, with no restrictions. All it takes a skilled enough cheater is time, and they will bypass it. The only way to test server side anti-cheat is by hopping in the game, trying to learn how it works, and trying to bypass it. That is a much more time consuming and expensive process.

o7

Steam Link doesn’t work on Linux. SteamVR, ALVR, WiVRN, and Monado work under Linux.There’s more headsets than the Quest.

Surprising that Boneworks wasn’t mentioned. The whole game is physics based puzzles, meaning you can either solve them, or stack a couple boxes and jump really high. These types of solutions are encouraged in the game, and there’s a couple puzzles I’ve never even solved because the walls were too low.

I don’t have a direct source other than the source code of the software they use: https://github.com/mautrix/signal

When using one of their “cloud hosted” bridges, the bridge software (that connects between Matrix/Beeper and other protocols) has to read all message content. Otherwise, it’s impossible to bridge to another protocol. E2EE becomes end (other users) to bridge (beeper) encryption.

With “local hosted” bridges, E2EE stays intact, but messages can’t be sent/received if the device hosting the bridge is unavailable.

In the future, with MLS (a different E2EE protocol), it could be possible to keep E2EE even when bridging to Matrix on cloud hosted bridges.

The linux binary is being used.

Try Proton. Currently, Proton is much more developed than the Linux support for many game engines.

On the Steam Deck, while using SteamOS (or other Linux distros), EAC (and a few others like Battleye) run in userspace, not as kernel level.

The intention of Anti-Cheat and DRM is to hide what they’re doing, in an attempt to prevent people from cheating or pirating. Malware often uses similar techniques to hide what it’s doing.

Kernel level Anti-Cheat runs with the highest level of permission on your system, meaning it has access to everything happening on your PC, and all your hardware.

That means kernel level Anti-Cheat can do whatever it wants on your computer, and it’s intentionally hard to figure out what it’s doing. Even though it’s probably not harmful, it shares a lot of similarities with actual malware, and we can’t be fully sure whether it is harmful or not. This is why a lot of people are against kernel level Anti-Cheat.

EAC, afaik, has acted as just an anti cheat, and is therefore likely not harmful to your system. However, like other Anti-Cheats, it is harmful with the standards being set.

That’s, very odd. Just watched the bit about TP2 in the video, and I’m getting nowhere near that on my Steam Deck (non-oled).

Setting everything to low, and FSR performance, it looks awful. There’s very obvious upscaling artifacting, especially during motion. Performance is playable at about 30-40 fps, except in the “starting hub” of the game, where performance can dip to 10fps at times (although no real gameplay occurs there).

With everything being set so low, LODs are clearly visible, even on the small screen. Gaps in signs, thin walls, and stairs are visible from ~5 in game meters away.

On the settings they show in the video, with a fresh save, I get similar numbers in the first couple minutes of the game, but FPS tanks after that. On a save further into the game, I’m getting maybe 20fps (50 when staring at the floor).

The game is still very playable on the lowest settings, and if you’re into puzzle games like The Talos Principle, it’s still a good experience. I’m not normally one to stream my games from my PC, but The Talos Principle 2 is just a better experience with more powerful hardware.

What difference does it make updating the screen 75 times per second if you’re only getting 25 different images per second? The OLED screen (iirc) doesn’t visually change during every screen refresh (if the displayed frame is the same). Limiting to 25/50/75hz would have zero visual difference at 25fps, but would draw more power at higher refresh rates.

Most malware is written for Windows, especially when it’s distributed as a Windows executable. (Almost) no Windows malware targets Wine specifically. However, Wine on its own is not a sandboxing tool, and Windows ransomware will ruin your day.

Bottles does two things for security:

1. Separate wineprefixes
2. Being a flatpak

By separating wineprefixes, as long as the host filesystem is not directly exposed (which iirc is default for bottles), any malware not written with Wine in mind will only affect its own “bottle”.

By being a flatpak, even if some Windows malware specifically targets Wine, it would still have to escape the flatpak sandbox for elevated permissions. If the bottles flatpak has no access to personal files, “Wine-aware” malware won’t either.

Although malware can still do damage, even in its own sandbox. For example, botnet type malware would still function. The host system is “safe”, but the damage can still be done externally. Usually application-defined “autostarting” of applications is broken under Wine (iirc), which means all non “Wine-aware” malware will only start when an infected windows application is started in bottles.

Any sandbox will eventually be escaped, and malware sophisticated enough will be able to get access to everything on the host system. The chances of running into malware like this in the wild are extremely small.

• Is it fully secure? No.
• Is your virtual Windows environment safe? No.
• Are other “bottles” safe? Likely, as long as the malware isn’t aware of Wine.
• Is your Linux host safe? Most likely, depending on your flatpak settings. (and the malware has to specifically target Wine under Flatpak).

For 2, Persona 5 Royal (in its opening hours if I’m not mistaken). The only one available on Steam.

Edit: Didn’t realise tactica was already out. I stopped following the releases of the Persona spinoffs literred with Denuvo.

And the reason you mentioned Ubuntu is “finicky” was explained above. It is not a good “just works” distro, there’s much better options than Ubuntu.

It used to be (one of) the best “just works” distros, but is somehow one of the worst now. Outdated blogposts still recommend it, and Canonical still calls themselves the “most used” desktop distro. The alternatives are just better.

Although Unity and Epic are not related (other than both being companies that make a game engine), and Epic is not related to these Unity pricing changes, Epic has still done a lot of things “wrong”. Especially for gaming on Linux. A lot of games that are currently unplayable under Linux is due to kernel-level (rootkit) anti-cheats. Being the creators of EAC, Epic has actively been harming the compatibility of games on Linux. Developers “can enable Proton support”, but even Epic themselves in many of their own titles don’t enable this.

They haven’t pissed off the larger gaming industry to the point where everybody is moving off their platform/products, but they are still a greedy corporation. Remember the whole exclusives thing on the epic games store?

Depending on the application you used to alert you of the AirTag, it’s possible that your phone did not send location data back to Apple.

Apple can track AirTags, because iPhones are programmed to listen for them over Bluetooth Low Energy, and send the ID of the AirTag and location data of the device to Apple.

If your Android phone has an application to listen for BLE devices in the background, keeping track (locally) of which devices it saw in what locations, that application can tell you if you’re travelling with an AirTag (or similar device). It might even be able to interact with the AirTag, such as making it beep or reading its ID. If that application doesn’t send your location to Apple, the AirTag was not able to use your phone to make its location known to the owner.

Therefore, to the owner, AirTags are useless unless an iPhone (or other device that sends its location to Apple) is around.

Not just the “lack of APKs”, but the lack of a FOSS build. As you noted, it is possible to instal an AAB by extracting the APK(s) inside, but that doesn’t magically remove non-foss libraries.

The only build is an aab file. This is a Play Store bundle file, not an APK, so not directly installable in Android without the Google Play Store.

The only build being a Google Play release also indicates that non-foss libraries were likely included, such as the FCM libraries, as is common for GPlay releases of otherwise FOSS projects.

As far as I’m concerned, Element X for Android is not available yet, unless either building from source (with modifications to included libraries), or by using a non-FOSS version from GPlay.

Your iPhone 13 syncs slower over USB because Apple decided to stay on Lightning connectors, which use USB 2.0 on the other end. Although FireWire was faster back when it co-existed with USB, the USB standard has surpassed it a long time ago with more power, faster speeds, and better physical connectors.

The source code of a program is like a recipe and list of ingredients. If you buy a coffee from Starbucks, you get a coffee from Starbucks. You can’t easily change the beans used, the brew temperature, etc. With the recipe, you could brew your own with slight differences, or make coffee from scratch knowing everything that’s in Starbucks coffee. With the source code for a game, you could change/mod anything. FPS unlock mods, ports to other platforms, and much more. You could make your own game, and make it better knowing how some systems work in another game.

Some games have their source code leaked, in which case it is illegal to own, redistribute, or learn from the code. Although it’ll usually still happen, it’s much more “underground” than games where the source code was reverse engineered. Reverse engineering is like buying a coffee, tasting it, then coming up with your own recipe. Having your own recipe almost exactly identical to the original still allows you to make changes easily, but it’s not illegal, as you wrote it, and are allowed to share your own recipe. Some older titles like Super Mario 64 have been fully reverse engineered, and ported to every possible platform, with multiplayer mods, FPS unlock mods, etc.

VRChat in particular has been degrading in quality and experience ever since they needed to start pleasing investors. You can give it a try if you want, but there’s a lot of toxicity there. Platforms like ChilloutVR or NeosVR have a better (but smaller) community.

Although some titles like BONELAB or Pavlov do feel a lot more like “tech demos”, they are still great titles. Some desktop titles also have VR ports that are worth playing, No Mans Sky and The Talos Principle come to mind.

The modding scenes of a lot of games have good VR mods too, “Vivecraft”, if you’re into Minecraft. Subnautica has a good VR mod, Half-Life 2, Deep Rock Galactic, Outer Wilds, and much more.

Lets take the imaginary program Y. It is free open source software with the GPLv3 license. If Valve wants to include Y in SteamOS, they are free to do so. Any time Valve makes changes or fixes to Y, they are legally required to provide the source code of their changes, as stated in the GPL license included with Y.

A lot of programs have this license (or a similar one), which forces corporations to contribute back to FOSS projects.

Some Valve-made components in SteamOS are truly “SteamOS only”, but a good amount of fixes to non-Valve programs are submitted “upstream” (to the original project). Due to the nature of Linux, it might be possible to copy the few non-foss components in SteamOS and directly use them in another distro.

Alongside forced contributions due to licensing, Valve contributes a lot of code to “gaming” programs on Linux, such as Wine or DXVK. They also make some SteamOS components FOSS, including Gamescope for example. Valve is (currently) doing a lot of work “for the community” rather than for direct profit.

Mainly their creation of Proton, and contributions to DXVK and WINE have helped Linux gaming become possible on any distro.