Hey everyone, Bit here. Electronic Arts and Respawn Entertainment recently decided to block all Linux users from playing Apex Legends over alleged concerns of cheating on the OS. However, I would like to explain in my opinion how these concerns of cheating are unproven, as they relate to the entire concept of playing multiplayer video games on Linux.
The news of the end of Linux support for Apex
EA and Respawn put a blog post on the game’s official account @playapex@x.com.
(X Articles don't play nicely with embeds, sorry.)
2,416
This sent shocks through the Apex Legends community as a whole as well as the Linux gaming community. While I do not use Linux full-time (right now some could say my primary desktop OS is MacOS because I do a lot of work on my MacBook Air), I still fully support Linux and will try to make things that work across devices wherever possible, whether it be making cross-platform native apps or making web apps (which are cross-platform because they run in browsers). This also shocked me because this is only the second time that a company has supported Linux and then pulled out, the other time being Rockstar with Grand Theft Auto Online (I don’t play GTA).
Why the alleged cheating issue is unproven
In my opinion, this alleged cheating concern is unproven, and I will try to explain why in these next sections.
Argument 1: The ALGS hacks
The Apex Legends Global Series (ALGS) is the largest Apex Legends esports tournament, hosted by EA themselves. In ALGS 2024, two players were hacked in the middle of the tournament and had cheats applied to their games and their computers were under remote control. The first player to be targeted, Genburten, noticed that the cheats and remote control were happening and immediately exited the match. Another player named ImperialHal was also targeted, and the admins noticed the issues and promptly ended the match.
View article from The Verge about the hack here.
Keep in mind that neither of these players were on Linux. These issues happened on Windows. A virus that implemented remote code execution was likely at play, and while some speculated it was an exploit in the game’s anti-cheat engine (EasyAntiCheat), the EAC developers said that it was not the cause.
Argument 2: The Proton layer (or other sandboxes)
The Proton layer acts as an effective sandbox that could be combined with anti-cheat software. Sandboxes are also offered by packaging systems like Snap and Flatpak, and Steam has a Flatpak version for Linux. Sandboxing could prevent other software on the Linux machine from tampering with games without effort. Anti-cheat software could monitor the game’s execution environment for unexpected execution and terminate anything not related to the game. Sandboxing and monitoring wouldn’t stop cheating completely, but it would make it harder to do so. Hardware cheating, which requires controlling the game through automation or using hardware control augments like the Cronus Zen, is possible but time-consuming and expensive.
Argument 3: Cheating is rampant even with small Linux playerbase
Search “apex legends cheating issues” on a search engine (I used Google and DuckDuckGo) and you’ll see many news articles. Many of them come before the announcement about dropping Linux support, meaning that removing Linux support probably doesn’t do much about cheating in the game. The game’s playerbase on Linux was probably quite small, but if there are communities that shouldn’t be fooled with, the Linux community is probably one of them (and probably FOSS as a whole, see WordPress/Automattic/Matt Mullenweg’s controversy with WP Engine). People were quite vocal about the end of Apex Legends on Linux (including Steam Deck), but since EA is a wealthy company they simply won’t listen.
Valve’s reaction
In what seems to be a reaction to this, Valve has decided to require games that have kernel level anti-cheat to disclose that on the game page. This would help people make informed buying decisions, or dissuade people from investing in games that use kernel level anti-cheat.
View Valve’s official blog post here.
This is good news, and this would probably be something good for both Windows and Linux users. Less games with kernel level anti-cheat would make more games compatible with Linux, and it would reduce the reliance on kernel mode. Less kernel mode software is good since interacting with the kernel can cause system stability issues (see CrowdStrike disaster).
In conclusion
I hope to see more games support Linux in the future. There are many that do. Activision Blizzard has some support for Linux as Overwatch 2 is rated Playable by Valve’s Deck Verified and is Gold rank on ProtonDB. Developer Alfa Bravo even has a first-person shooter called Combat Master (which closely resembles 2019’s CoD: Modern Warfare) that is Linux and MacOS native. Valve even supports their own competitive multiplayer experiences such as Counter-Strike 2 and Team Fortress 2 on Linux. Even competitive multiplayer games that use kernel anti-cheat such as The Finals are rated Gold on ProtonDB because they chose to enable the Linux settings in EasyAntiCheat.
If you want to discover what works on Linux in your Steam library, go to https://protondb.com.
