Most games I know about do both, but my understanding is it's hard to stop some of the client-side stuff server-side.

Look, we've been here before. I'm not super invested in multiplayer stuff, so I don't care that much, but I am old enough to remember when gamedevs would not even try crossplay and just let the PC be the wild west when it comes to cheating.

I didn't necessarily hate it. I lived in a world of dedicated servers where moderation and security came down to some kid in his underpants being pretty sure he didn't like you and kicking you out. I'm guessing there's a bit too much money and too much of an expectation of free-form matchmaking for the mass market to go back to that.

But hey, I'm not a security software engineer and I'm not excessively involved in competitive shooters, which seems to be where most of the problem happens. My interest in this is having enough PC security for crossplay to make matchmaking in fighting games less of a hassle than it used to be in the Street Fighter 4 days. You sweaty FPS nerds can do whatever, as far as I'm concerned.

You'll never catch all cheaters no matter what you do. All the kernel access in the world won't stop someone from having a secondary device hooked into the monitor output and faking a dumb keyboard and mouse.

A solid robust server-side solution and well architected server-client system will stop 99% of cheating. And no, Kernel AC is not part of a "well architected" system.

It's, at best, a bandaid for a shitty server-client system that introduces a shit ton of privacy and security issues for everyone that uses it. Shit needs to stay out of the kernel unless absolutely necessary, and that goes for Linux, Windows or MacOS kernels.

Almost every blue screen/Kernel panic I've dealt with was traced back to some shit hooking itself into the kernel where it didn't belong. And absolutely fuck third-party antivirus that hooks into the kernel too.

Anticheats on Linux don’t have kernel access

Yeah, I know. I'd like it to stay that way. Furthermore, this is also why games with kernel-level anticheat still don't work on linux, despite developments in wine/proton.

The post is about anticheat that doesn't work on linux. Non-kernel-level anticheat works fine now thanks to wine/proton. That just leaves kernel-level anticheat. If a game has kernel-level anticheat, the studio is not going to remove it for the sake of a linux version. Therefore, to be compatible with linux, they would be introducing kernel-level anticheat into a linux version. To this, I say "fuck no".

The lengths people go to prevent cheating in single player games is astonishing. I'm really glad Paradox finally allows achievements on modded installs of their games.

Denuvo et al are exactly what I'm talking about.