I recently wrote about how it's looking pretty unlikely that Rust will actually be supported on Steam Deck / Linux with Proton, and it's not looking any better right now.
Previously it was just comments from Facepunch Studios' Garry Newman on Twitter, with Newman trying to explain their thoughts on why it hasn't happened yet. Now, we have another and perhaps a bit more public / official answer with their latest official news post on the Rust website including a note at the bottom about it from Alistair McFarlane, the Producer at Facepunch, that reads:
You know, we switched to EAC's new platform with the intention of providing support for the Steam Deck, and so far we haven't done that. So when is it coming?
Well, short answer is we don't know. We don't know if it is. When we discontinued linux support in 2019, one of the core reasons was how the cheating community was exploiting the Linux platform. That's not to say that cheating was super widespread on Linux, but it was safer for cheat developers. And that's not good in a game like Rust where a cheater can ruin weeks of hard work.
Enabling proton support would mean we're asking the EAC team to provide support for a whole other platform, which we fear would reduce their ability to support Windows - our main platform. We don't know whether we should enable one platform at the disadvantage of another.
The one thing we don't want to do is to enable Proton support to only discontinue it six months later. We don't want to encourage players to spend their money on a Deck to play Rust and then be in a position where we want to take that ability away.
For now, we're still weighing up the risks and will continue to explore options with EAC. Don't expect to see Proton support in the near future, but we hope to have it enabled someday.
So it's basically the same story as what Newman explained. They don't wish to potentially open up Rust to more cheat developers again, where they don't seem to feel confident that EAC would be able to keep up with it on top of preventing the cheats on Windows too (which is obviously the main platform).
It is a genuine shame, since Rust is (while quite brutal) a great survival game and very popular. It's also interesting, because clearly they think that EAC don't provide all that great protection on Linux if they're that worried about what would happen again. While again, other games like Apex have it, they're very different games.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Damn cheaters. I don't understand the motivation, wouldn't you get no satisfaction from winning if you cheat? What's the point exactly?
psycho_driver Oct 7, 2022
Quoting: hardpenguinRIP
It is hilarious to watch that intrusive anti-cheat will never be as intrusive on Linux as it is on Windows...
I'm ok with that. To me, at least, nothing of value has been lost here.
Quoting: TheSHEEEPI'd be upset if there weren't dozens of other VERY similar (if not better, at least I liked 7 Days To Die a lot more) games that run perfectly fine on Linux.7 days to die and Ark in particular are just "rust but better", and both have well supported linux clients. Rust was never that good, it was just pretty early in the survival game wave, half the shit in it is unimplemented or half-implemented because gary could never decide what he wanted the game to be so he kept ripping out everything and starting over.
Characters are randomized(including genital sizes) as part of some social experiment on the developers part. Any discussion on having the player being able to customize their character usually goes downhill fast as the game attracts a very juvenile audience that gets a kick out of people being annoyed by the lack of character customization.
Rust is less of a game and more of a social experiment designed by a troll for trolls.
Though it does suck for those interested in the game that the dev seems hostile towards Linux and doesn't seem to be that motivated to support the platform.
Quoting: GeeksOnHugsSo why is it more difficult on Rust then other games? Is there anything Valve can do to make anti-cheat easier for developers on SteamOS? Maybe Valve could build their own into the OS and offer it to devs free of charge? I dunno if that's a good idea or not, just wondering.
Damn cheaters. I don't understand the motivation, wouldn't you get no satisfaction from winning if you cheat? What's the point exactly?
If you eat their arguments, it's not about how easy it is, but how intrusive and proven it is.
EAC on Linux/Proton only does userspace anticheat, on Windows it can hook into the signed kernel. It might be possible for EAC to write an open source kernel module, upsteam it and then whitelist certain signed kernels, but that would be a consistent source of work, as this would take a lot of validation and signature handling. Also, I wouldn't take bets if it would actually be considered a feature by the kernel developers, so it might never get upstreamed.
Even if they did all that, Rust Developers would probably not use it since they used a crazy argument that they don't want to put support work on EAC for Linux. That's the real point, they don't want us as customers.
Last edited by const on 8 October 2022 at 9:24 am UTC
FurbyOnSteroid Oct 8, 2022
I'm really struggling to buy that. I really don't want to be a conspiracy guy that always sees the evil in people/companies but I'm genuinely struggling in this case.
Last edited by FurbyOnSteroid on 8 October 2022 at 12:34 pm UTC
Quoting: FurbyOnSteroidBut they are fine that the EAC-Team splits resources for Mac? Which afaik, after googling, got support the same day as linux/steam deck? Which seems to even have full native support still (I guess mac doesn't have something as effective as Proton, so it's not that easy to ditch support for it)?
I'm really struggling to buy that. I really don't want to be a conspiracy guy that always sees the evil in people/companies but I'm genuinely struggling in this case.
I'm not sure if EAC on Mac is userspace only, but as I pretexted: "If you eat their arguments". In my opinion, Garry has long been and continues to be anti-linux, but that's just an opinion.
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