this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
10 points (91.7% liked)

Steam Deck

14838 readers
185 users here now

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:

Link to our Matrix Space

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I hear talks about drm and kernel anti cheat being harmful for the steam deck. Is easy anti cheat considered under the harmful a malware category, too?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

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.