Dkms modules would have to be on an approved list I think.

The EBF module can be inspected, and EAC won’t have kernel access, so that limits it significantly. Things like crowdstrike, completely hiding it’s processes, etc shouldn’t be possible without it having kernel access.

The systemd service can easily be confirmed to only run while a game is running as well. You can even restrict the service to be masked except when specific games are running.

EAC having root access is a valid concern though, it will have full access to your entire filesystem. Normally you can restrict what files a systemd service can access, so we may be able to quarantine this to block any privacy concerns. However we’ll have to wait until it comes out to know that part.

Overall it’s not perfect, but users will have much higher ability to audit it on Linux versus the Windows version.

You can have multiple kennels installed, so you could normally boot with mainline, but if you wanted to play a EAC game you could reboot with an approved kernel.

My understanding is that there’s a systemd service that runs only when the game runs, and that uses ePBF to restrict read/write access to the game files while it’s running (to prevent tampering). The tpm/secure boot/recognized kernel part is to make sure the user doesn’t have a modified kernel that will lie to the anti-cheat.

If everything works like they say, they shouldn’t have access to the non-game files and no direct kernel access. So privacy should be maintained, and theoretically no risk of a EAC bug or exploit causing a full system crash.

Overall it sounds much better to me than windows anti-cheat, but that’s a pretty low bar.

3 limits is the max duration for videos uploaded as a short

Apparently it’s vibe coded. From their announcement:

Programming is hard. So, instead of doing that, we vibe coded a new Epic Games Launcher that’s way faster and more responsive than the current one, and has a new look.

I’m not saying that, I’m just saying don’t throw away the carrot

It’s better for a company to do a good thing for the wrong reasons than it is for them to do another wrong thing. I’m not going to change my opinion of Facebook over this, but I also don’t think we should avoid benefiting from one of the few good things they’re doing with their money.

Imagine if they were donating money to the feed the poor, and someone was saying we should burn the money instead of buying food, just because Facebook wasn’t sincere enough.

I think gamenative may hit your expectations, it’s surprisingly smooth. Once you’re signed in, your library comes up, and it shows you what games should be compatible (which is most of them, but doesn’t factor in performance). There are community reported configs that work, so games will automatically default to proton versions/etc that are known to work.

Pretty cool, especially for android based handhelds.

Another similar project is Gamenative, which I’ve been using some. It’s worked well in my testing.

Yeah, when I upgraded my Deck’s m.2 drive to 1tb I used cloning as well, but it was mainly just because I didn’t want to reinstall all my games/emulators/plugins/etc. Definitely worked smoothly to do it that way.

Fantastic, I’m happy that worked for you.

I do wonder how many good controllers get thrown away over drift from stuff like this.

Thanks for sharing, hopefully it will help someone.

From reading on the issue, it may be a timeout during a large TRIM operation. With larger drives, you can have large scale TRIM operations fail for a couple reasons, but it mostly comes down to the volume of the requested consecutive operations being more than the NVME drive’s controller can handle in one go, or more than it can handle within the typical 30 second timeout window for these commands.

If it was this, you could either temporarily disable trim for the drive before running the install, or possibly tweak the mkfs commands in the install script to include the nodiscard option.

There’s different thumbstick parts for LCD and OLED, the switch you’re talking about is only on the LCD thumbsticks, and it’s for switching between type A and type B sticks (the LCD originally had 2 different thumbstick parts that aren’t interchangeable). When replacing sticks for the LCD deck, you used to have to check if you had A or B sticks and order different models depending on that, but the added A/B switch means there’s now only one LCD stick model to buy.

The OLED sticks have some completely different design parts, for example the LB/RB buttons are actually part of the OLED stick, which is nice since those can be permanently ruined by dropping the deck. Repairing broken LB/RB on the LCD deck is much harder, but changes like this means you can’t have interchangeable sticks between LCD and OLED.

Monopolies can benefit the consumer, at least in the short term. When Netflix was the streaming monopoly, it had more popular content at a much lower price. Competition between streaming platforms has resulted in better deals for studios selling streaming rights to their content, but a much worse deal for the end consumers.

Similar deal with Audible, their monopoly on audiobook sales leads to really good deals for their users, at the cost of terrible payouts and cut percentages for authors and publishers.

To be clear I’m not saying that monopolies are good, but saying they never benefit consumers isn’t quite accurate either. As a storefront you can use high user counts to force better deals, which helps retain users and block out competition.

Yeah SteamOS is read only anyways, so you could skip the systems part of the bwrap command when using it on steamOS.

As for games inside proton, they have full access to your files mounted as a Z: drive iirc. So it’s possible for them to mess with your files, if the dev prepares for it.

I’m playing 2nd chapter right now, and yeah it’s such a great QoL feature. It’s a real shame more games don’t do something similar.

Just for the security part of it, you can isolate steam games from your file system. Some people prefer flatpak steam on regular linux because you can easily block it’s access to system/user files and only let it access steam files and library directories.

For steamOS, you can create a fake home folder and add a bwrap command to the launch options, which will set system files as read only and only let it have direct access to the fake home folder.

Yeah, part of the early recommendation for using the pause games plugin was to increase your swap size to 16GB or more, to make room for running multiple games like this. Most everyone just sticks to the default ZRAM now, and even if you increase the emergency swap I don’t think the system will use it until the ZRAM is maxed capacity.

A recent steamOS update said it was laying the foundation for hibernation, which should be a more battery friendly alternative to sleep.

The second part depends on the game, some will just work. Others need to run a first launch script and install some stuff before launch, which I agree should be part of the download process. Finally some games require license check or additional network access on first launch while the game is running, and this part can’t be automated by valve. Overall it’s just a good habit to always run newly installed games once, at least long enough to get to the main menu.