It took many re-reads to realize this is about the game Rust running on Linux, not the language Rust running on Linux

After reading the title i was like “wait, is this about the game, the programming language, the movie, or corrosion?” Too many damn things called rust these days lol

I’m an idiot and even I can smell the bullshit coming off of this post.

Last I checked every cheat website I ever saw/got advertised/etc were selling windows executables with the swipe of a credit card.

This cry of “Linux is for cheaters!” is just the gaming equivalent of “Wont someone think of the children?!”. a stupid slogan used by assholes to push their opinion/agenda in defiance of facts and reality.

“It’s way harder to get our malware to work on Linux” is more or less what I took away from that.

To note, even if the claim of ‘more cheaters than Linux players’ at the end of lifecycle is true, it is a blatant lie by omission. I played Rust from 2016 til shortly after the game went out of Early Access. I stopped playing because Facepunch had completely ruined the Linux builds of the game by removing the long-standing OpenGL output and forcing the new (at the time to Unity) and completely untested Vulkan output as the only option on Linux. For anyone unfortunate enough to experience playing Rust at the end of its Linux run, the game would regularly have major graphical glitches and various rendering errors, including graphical artifacting that would be seizure inducing. If you are prone to epilepsy or otherwise sensitive to bright or flashing lights, please do not click this link. To note, the attached video is a mild case of what commonly happened when playing. That is, if the crashes and many hardware just no longer being able to launch the game properly didn’t impede that.

Given all of that, I genuinely wouldn’t be surprised if the only “people” running the Linux client were actually cheat bots because there is no way many people were actually still playing the absolute rugpull of a game toward the end of its life.

It’s [proton/linux] a vector for cheat development

Man, being a Linux user, I need to be careful about my relationship with my wife. According to this guy all Linux users are cheaters.

Cheaters who are serious use DMA cheats or fast AI classification on the video output. An external machine runs the cheat software and takes the input from your mouse. It connects to the PC running the game over USB where it pretends to be a mouse. It can adjust your mouse input on the fly to hit targets based on target solutions generated by the cheating PC. It can even read map and location data and display them on the original screen with some additional hardware.

The whole setup costs about as much as a midrange gaming PC though.

Nothing runs on the machine and it is completely undetectable to local anticheat. They could maybe catch people by VOD watching or by analyzing their mouse movement on the server-side… but local anticheat only catches cheaters on a budget.

Funny, let’s see how this looks after the the GabeCube drops and hopefully with a similar impact as the Steam Deck. I keep my popcorn ready

Also, gross, reddit.

The LiNuX pLaYeRs ChEaT excuse. It’s bullspit, and they know it. That’s because they can’t spy on Linux players very easily unless someone makes an OPSEC mistake.

Obligatory fuck Gary Newman

This is so sad, because rust is kinda the perfect example of a game where moderators or deputization could handle cheaters. Instead of a matchmaking system, you just join a server and play there. Why not ensure those servers have active moderators to ban cheaters?

I stopped gaming (for now?), but I’m still really fond of what happened with SCP secret labaratory, which had 20-40 player lobbies. There would almost always be a mod online, and I could get cheaters kicked instantly when by reporting them in the menu, then a mod would spectate them, and then they would get banned.

Rust seems to have more players per server (a quick search says some of the extra mega ultra large servers go up to 900 people), but it does have a distinct server model, with admins and mods.

EDIT: the other fun stuff of having active and actually good mods was when they ran fun events. Like I remember they set up a sharks and minnows type game mode instead of the regular stuff. Fun times.

I’m sure he’s at least mostly right about the cheating thing, because in many cases the Linux-compatible EAC binary is just a stub with literally no detections of any kind. And even if they did have detections, given that the EAC runs within Wine they’d have no way of detecting something as simple as information cheats (wallhacks, ESP) that read /proc/$(pidof rust.exe)/maps from Linux userspace. For a game like Rust, such cheats are probably the most popular ones.

What I do seriously doubt is his claim of Linux users making up “less than .01% of the total player base”. It just seems incongruent with the total Linux user market share on Steam. Though he does qualify it by saying this stat is from when they stopped supporting Linux, i.e. 2019. The situation is obviously quite different now with Linux being at 3% total and ~6% of English-language users on Steam, so if it’s not an outright lie it’s at least very disingenuous.

Rust (game) looks well designed gameplay-wise from what I see in Willjum videos, and such. Given the number of cheaters I also see then I don’t think this person has any say on which devs are serious about anti-cheat. Linux haters gonna’ hate.