PC Gaming

Wow, what a bad article. "Companies can spy on you anyway so just give them kernel access" is interesting logic... They tout the effectiveness of kernel-level anti-cheat by claiming they've never encountered a cheater in Valorant. This is either a lie or ignorance that demonstrates the author isn't qualified to write on the topic. A websearch will return pages of results and examples of working cheats for Valorant. Valorant is actually one of the easier games to write cheats for.

The majority of cheats used today are not impacted or detected in any way by kernel-level anti-cheat. At all. This is because most cheats are not even run on the machine that is used to run the game. Its wild that the author just doesn't address this reality.

Cheaters use a 2nd computer, outside the reach of anti-cheat, that receives and processes the video-output of the game. The kernel-level anti-cheat can only monitor the system that the game actually runs on, which is completely clean. The 2nd computer runs either a colorbot (especially trivial and effective for games like Valorant that outline enemies in a solid color) or an AI object-recognition model (a quick search will return loads of specialized models trained for various online shooters) to identify the location of enemies on screen. It then generates mouse movements and inputs that are sent back to the 1st computer running the game, while the kernel-level anti-cheat is completely unaware.

These cheats are so efficient that they are commonly run on cheap hardware like an arduino or raspberry pi, and the code is often very simple, sometimes just ~100 lines of python. They can also be subtle and hard to notice by other players (probably why the author may believe they don't play with cheaters in Valorant), providing aim-assist or click-assist that works with the cheater's authentic mouse movements, and sometimes only kicks in when an enemy is already close to the cheater's crosshair.

The author also cherry-picks examples to lead the reader into believing that all multiplayer games require Windows anti-cheat to be successful, while conveniently not mentioning the many competitive multiplayer games that do support Linux and are a perfectly normal online experience, eg Marvel Rivals, Overwatch, Halo Infinite, or Dota 2. Can the author explain why these games are completely fine without Windows anti-cheat?

They don't challenge, and misrepresent, the invalid reasoning given by some of these game companies for why they arbitrarily chose to block access from Linux, for example Apex Legends claimed the majority of their cheaters use Linux. But wait, how could they know that if cheaters cannot be detected on Linux? So they must be successfully detecting Linux cheaters. Apex Legends' actual reasoning for disallowing Linux directly contradicts the claims that the author is trying to make. It's not true that the majority of their cheaters run Linux, of course. The majority of cheaters fly under the radar by running Windows and allowing the anti-cheat to verify a clean system, while just running the cheat software on a 2nd computer.