Microsoft Windows kernel changes don't suddenly mean big things for Linux gaming

I have 0 interest in this guy's takes.

He pushed an awful battle royale game that just took people's money (including mine) and never actually launched.

He also once got into a Twitter (edit: it was actually mastodon) argument with me when he posted about an open source developer being "selfish" or something like that for telling him "if you don't like the readme, open a pull request with the changes you want made to it." Long story short, I told him it wasn't cool to make a post bullying an open source developer to donate more of their free time to something they didn't want to do, and that they have every right to tell him "go do it yourself." He blocked me.

Yeah, he runs a Linux gaming website, yeah he talks about games that run on Linux which is cool, but ... make no mistake he doesn't have some deeper journalistic insight. If Microsoft does forbid kernel level anticheat, that will indeed be a game changer.

it only means nothing because the person that are determined to want to Linux fail will just move the goal posts to something else. But if it means less Rootkits that pretend to be anti-cheat drm the better.

Not really a fan of the author's attitude at the start (I'm not quite sure how I'd describe it, but it certainly feels off...) - however I do agree with the premise. Even if Microsoft stops allowing kernel level anti-cheat to happen (and honestly I'll believe it when I see it), that doesn't mean that game developers/publishers who are hostile to Linux players are suddenly going to go "Oh! Well in that case..."

I'd be incredibly happy to be wrong in this case, but as of how the current landscape is, I just don't see it changing. They'll just find some other BS reason to exclude Linux players.

I stopped purchasing games that weren't compatible with Linux long ago, and the one holdover I had was Destiny 2 - but the game's major story has come to an end, which makes it a great time for me to drop it too.

Games requiring kernel-level anti-cheat are such a small minority of games that I struggle to think how this could mean big anything (good or bad) to Linux gaming in general.

It just means that MS will start enforcing the use of Pluton as a hard requirement for Windows 12 after Windows 11 is end-of-life. You saw it happen with TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot with 11, history repeats itself.

It's a pretty tepid way of thinking about the issue to be honest. In a strategic sense, basically any move Microsoft is forced to make for actual (rather than apparent) security makes it harder for them to do things in a way which creates lock-in. Yes, they will use it to push for DRM, as another commenter noted, but that's another apparent security solution. In the long term, this is a positive, but it's not an immediate and direct benefit, as the blog post notes.

ThIs iS tHe YeAr oF tHe LiNuX dEsKtOp!!