As always, more nuance is inside, but some major bullet points:
- native Linux support for the launcher
- very openly vibe coded, if that’s a line in the sand for you
- Fortnite will be, but is not yet, updated with a new version of Easy Anti Cheat to be compatible with Linux. Yes, there are versions of EAC compatible with Linux today, but not up to Epic’s standards of cheat prevention, and whatever is up to their standards requires coordination with distro maintainers.
- their FAQ openly mentions the necessity of compatibility layers, but I don’t see any mention of native integration with them
Please vibe code the anti cheat. Wanna see it fall so badly
We got Epic Games Launcher on Linux before GTA 6.
“if that’s a line in the sand for you”
Given I’m hearing instances of vibe coded software completely deleting a drive as a way to efficiently uninstall it…it really should be a hard line in the sand for most people. If programming is so hard they can’t do it, how can we reasonably trust that the software will be robust? Why would I want to trust it at all?
There are tens of thousands of instances of car crash deaths in the US every year, but it probably doesn’t stop you from using cars as a mode of transit. My stance is that I won’t use a shit program. AI makes it more likely that the program is going to be shit, but I’ve probably used something made with AI by now, including video games, that did its job and wasn’t shit. The Epic store client was shit before it was vibe coded too, so I didn’t use it. The biggest improvement here regardless of vibe coding is that Linux players will be officially supported customers, so if I buy a copy of Alan Wake II, I have some sort of assurance that I’ll have recourse as a customer against an update that makes it inoperable to me.
Cars are just a tool, like AI, cars dont’t make crashes, drivers do. Drivers are responsible for their driving, just as progrrammers are responsible for their coding. AI doesn’t make more likely shitty programs, people make it more likely. Tools are just that, tools that do and make things, the people behind those tools are the responsible for how are used.
Vibe coding is just bad practice, like horribly wrong practice in 2026. I haven’t read the TOS for the new client so I won’t argue about the part about officially supported customers but I wouldn’t be surprised if that weren’t the case.
cars don’t make crashes, drivers do
Designing our infrastructure for cars first instead of people first encourages crashes to an extraordinary degree, but now we’re getting a bit far from the metaphor.
I don’t know what the TOS allows for, but it’s Epic’s actions regarding new Linux customers that I’d be more interested in. I’m not going to be the guinea pig with their Linux endeavors, but I’ll wait to see what happens the first time a Linux customer runs into problems with a Windows game and its compatibility. At least Epic has an incentive to not be hostile toward those customers anymore.
Code is code is code. Human or ai made.
Any idiot can swing a hammer, it takes a professional to build a house.
Ai useage is the same way. Any idiot can vibe out some slop, but a professional can use it as a proper tool to do a job or help them do theirs.
The problem with AI isn’t what it generates. It’s the training, the water consumption, the copyright and legal issues, and economics.
Ai in and of it self as a tool is fine as a concept. Shitty programs have always and will always exist. Ai didn’t change that in any way that really matters beyond there’s just more of them.
Maybe I’m being dumb, but why would I use this over Heroic? Is it meant to be a Heroic replacement or just the “official” client? Genuine question
It’s the official client, but I also doubt Heroic will play as nicely with live service games like Fortnite. There’s a decent chance that if you only play offline games, Heroic might remain better.
Ah, fair enough. I’ll probably stick with Heroic then
The OP acknowledges the vibe coding, but the opening from Epic’s announcement is worth quoting:
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.
It’s like they’re saying “Our launcher sucks and we couldn’t fix it, so we used AI to make a new one”. Other companies have been able to make good launchers without AI, but Epic just couldn’t do it.
They suck so much even the slop machine out coded their devs
Damn man, how bad are they at their job?!
Dont forget the line “advanced shopping features like a cart”
I can’t believe Tim Swiney is this fucking dumb. My expectations were on the floor and he got a shovel.
I can’t tell if this line is supposed to be self-deprecating or what
Tim Swiney is really dumb and has no idea how to read the room. I doubt this was a joke
It is. The Epic Games Store infamously launched without any of the features that are standard for online stores, like customer reviews or anything more than basic information about the product. They didn’t even have a shopping cart, something that was widely mocked at the time, and it was like an entire year before they got around to adding one. The only reason the store got any traction at all was because they used the billions they were making from Fortnite to bribe players with free games if they made an account and visited the store every week.
I don’t know why he’d poke fun at himself like that. The whole thing was the sort of fundamental development failure that you’d normally want everyone to forget about, but here he is giving people excuses to share stories about how incompetent his company is.
Vibe-coding a program that manages and deletes massive amounts of files, what could possibly go wrong?
Also handles payment information. Oh boy.
nothing could possibly go wrong
GH Issue link if you don’t want/have time to watch the video: https://github.com/valvesoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/3671
JFC. An
rm -rf /*because they didn’t check if a variable even had a value, let alone whether it pointed to a directory that should be removed. What a noob mistake.
That’s such a Tim Sweeney move
I thought you were jokingly rephrasing a quote, but no that’s actually the very first paragraph jfc
I understand that LLMs are useful tools for programming, that they churn stuff out fast and whatever.
But I so hate this anti-intellectual, exuberant embrace of ignorance. It’s one thing to vibecode out of necessity (those single dev slop projects), or to say you’re doing agentic engineering or whatever cleanup label, but it’s so frustrating for them to purely vibecode and not even try to hide it. And then to expect us to think it’s cute.
This behavior is unfortunately normal for epic, this is the same company that said their competitors giving users more information about what they are buying “irresponsible” https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/epic-boss-tim-sweeney-blasts-steam-for-putting-ai-tags-on-games-says-move-is-irresponsible-of-valve
That is such whiplash from the culture of engineering excellence Epic was known for.
Tim has been on the sauce for a while. He basically does the opposite of everything Valve does. Valve banned blockchain-based games, Epic opened the platform to scams with asset flip “games” attached. Valve regulated AI and required disclosure, Epic is now a safe haven for shovelware and Tim is screaming into the void that publishers should be allowed to hide AI usage.
Sweeney is like the Shadiversity of gaming. Massively overcompensating for his inferiority complex and forever doomed to live in the shadow of his more successful brother.
the Shadiversity of gaming. Massively overcompensating for his inferiority complex and forever doomed to live in the shadow of his more successful brother.
I don’t know, Shad wrote one of the worst books I’ve ever had the displeasure of reading, it’s pretty hard to beat that.
I’m OOTL on what’s wrong with Shadiversity. Got a link?
I’ve got links. Do you have two and a half hours and enough alcohol to numb the pain?
About the person: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SU8xmhI5WjA
About his disgusting atrocity of a novel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoOnElCEliA
Summary (cw: mention of fictional rape)
tl;dw: he’s an Australian sword youtuber who practices historical European martial arts (HEMA) and is much criticised by the HEMA community, he’s an anti-woke nutjob with a fragile sense of masculinity, he’s a gun nut who thinks Australia should have an equivalent to the 2nd amendment (which he’s ranted and screamed about at length, showcasing why it’s necessary to keep guns away from him), he’s an “AI activist” who thinks writing words into a text box makes him an artist (while producing images that, even among his peers, look horrid), and he’s the envious brother of the actual, successful artist Jazza (who seems like a genuinely fine dude). He also wrote the novel Shadow of the Conqueror, which is a boring, badly written, preachy self-insert power fantasy, where he moralizes that rape and the resulting pregnancy is good actually because motherhood is wonderful (I’m not paraphrasing that much, and it’s still fucking disgusting to think about).
WTF, Shadiversity is Jazza’s brother?! 🤯
Also, why is he much criticized by the HEMA community?
I’ve watched a few of his videos, but don’t know enough about HEMA to understand what’s bad about them.Never mind, I’m 10 minutes in on your linked vid and I get it now.(The rest of it I didn’t know… but I’m not surprised. Oh, and thanks very much for the TL;DW!)
I frequently use the phrase “coding is hard, let’s go shopping” when I encounter a particularly poorly written piece of software. “Coding is hard, can’t someone else just do it?” Doesn’t seem too far off.
Native Linux support doesn’t mean support for all distros. Wine is still your best bet.
Wine is still your best bet.
since we’re talking about Epic here hard liquor might be better
RPS’s article has the most accurate title: “We vibe coded a new Epic Games Launcher” because “programming is hard”, announce company we’re somehow supposed to see as a serious Steam competitor
requires coordination with distro maintainers
Which I really hope they just don’t get. Fuck Epic and fuck Tim Sweeney.
After years and years of Tim Sweeney shitting on Linux, he actually came crawling back.
Too little too late though, you burned every bridge.
He’s not just crawling back, he’s actively trying to ruin Linux by introducing kernel-level spyware.
I’m definitely not an expert, but it looks like the only software that they’re looking to implement above and beyond what comes with your distro is that systemd module, so I think that anti-cheat hook is what we’ll have to look out for. It ought to be pretty obvious when it’s about to happen, since I think that will be the only time you install a game from a game launcher and get prompted for an admin password for installation.
Requiring a signed kernel+modules plus TPM and Secure Boot attestation is another problem, especially if EAC limits you to approved signing keys since self-signed keys would still allow you to modify the system how you want.
TPM alone is a non-starter. Loads of people with old PCs moved to Linux in recent years due to Windows 11 requiring a TPM 2.0 chip, and now is hardly the best time to expect people to upgrade their hardware.
That and the risk of gaming distributions including Epic’s crap by default like they do for Steam, though I doubt any distro worth its salt would do so.
TPM alone is a non-starter. Loads of people with old PCs moved to Linux in recent years due to Windows 11 requiring a TPM 2.0 chip, and now is hardly the best time to expect people to upgrade their hardware.
But then they’re no worse off whether on Linux or not. I expect my next PC will have TPM2 enabled by default and will play nicely with everything I use, but I have no intention of using kernel level anti-cheat regardless. If you do want that, and there are people who do, then it’s the same thing on Windows except you can use an OS that isn’t utter garbage to daily drive.
That actually all looks pretty reasonable for what they’re trying to do. There’s very little novel there, they’re mostly leveraging existing security features
I’m not sure about that. Mandating a locked-down system with signed modules will be a tough sell for the Linux crowd depending on how strict they make it. Removing the ability to customize your kernel and restricting what drivers and services you can run goes against the entire open-source ethos.
Yeah that sucks for sure. Unfortunately doing all that does solve some real problems outside of videogames
Those problems would be solved by server side anti cheat. There’s no way to solve cheating with client side anti cheat. The only reason they do it is because it’s cheaper and they can get your data. Using AC as an excuse to lock down or limit systems is similar to using kids as an excuse to ask for everyone’s ID and ban VPNs.
Immutable distros are against the open-source ethos? That’s definitely a take.
Even with an immutable distro you’re able to obtain the source code and modify and recompile it to fit your needs. If EAC only accepts kernels signed by “trusted partners” that freedom goes away.
But you recompiling the kernel into whatever you need means it’s no longer the same immutable distro, it’s a fork of said distro. Whoever is actually using that immutable distro has their kernel restricted. You said restricting the kernel is not compatible with open source. If we talk about the average user an immutable distro means exactly that, it restricts the users access to the kernel. The average user doesn’t know nor should know how to make their own custom kernel.
You’re just fear mongering with what ifs. If you fart you may shit your pants. Does that mean you’d be afraid to fart for the rest of your life or would you think that’s stupid and you’re not going to worry about some baseless hypothetical? What would you tell the person who’s telling you to be afraid of farts?
To all the people saying they hope this doesn’t work out, do yah want more people on Linux or not? For some, Fortnite will be the killer game that they have to stay on Windows for.
This isn’t how you do it. Compromising an OS with kernel level anti cheat isn’t the compromise I’m willing to make just to get some gamers to switch off a terrible OS.
Compromising an OS with kernel level anti cheat
But they use Kernel integrated functionality from Linux. The difference to Windows Kernel Anticheat is, that they won’t have root rights on the users system when playing the game (if I understand this correctly). This is actually how you do it right.
I thought easy anti cheat wasn’t kernel level?
That’s really fair. I forget that anticheats are kernel level I guess, as it makes no sense. Hopefully, as the other reply to my comment mentioned, it’s not kernel level.
Well it depends on the view. It uses Kernel functionality to do that, so it is Kernel level. They just don’t get access to root, but its run on Kernel level.
Kernel Level Anti Cheat does not work on Linux, they have to do it otherwise.
They are using Kernel integrated functionality. So its a Kernel Level Anti Cheat, isn’t it? The difference is, that they use integrated functionality and do not have root rights on the system, if I understand correctly.
I’m not 100% read up on this but I’m cautiously optimistic that this doesn’t seem all that bad. It’s not kernel-level but appears good enough that it will have similar performance in detecting cheats.
Also seems like it should be fairly widely compatible. The bazzite team have already said they believe they should be compliant or have a clear path to being compliant.
I don’t want people that switch for this reason on Linux. Why do you think Windows sucks? Lowest. Common. Denominator.
No need to gatekeep, you should want everyone to be lifted up and not just those you deem worthy
Windows sucks because the company that makes it is betting you won’t leave, and they keep stuffing it full of other revenue streams and ads for them even though the OS isn’t even free. I’m no fan of kernel anti-cheat, but incompatibility with games that use it is a huge barrier for people switching that would otherwise choose to.
The LCD’s can continue to suffer until they finally learn to stop accepting slop. Nothing is forcing them to play shitty games like Fortnite
This guy gets it
That switch for what reason? They can do what they want with their PC, like play a game? Being able to do what I want with my PC is the main reason I switched to Linux.
I don’t want people that switch for this reason on Linux.
What reasons do you allow people to switch to Linux? Would be good to have such list, because I can link to it and tell them they are not allowed for given reasons. Thank you in advance.
Idk if epic is still doing that, but this image has been sitting on my phone for like 7 years
They swapped from one game you’ve probably heard of to two obscure indie games each week a while back, but yeah it’s still going on. They’re almost all forgettable outside of December, when they give out one game a day for the Advent calendar and a AAA game for Christmas.
They also have a rotation of three free developer assets every few weeks. Most of those are licensed for use in any engine, so it’s a good resource for game developers to follow even if they don’t use Unreal.
They still do it, but it’s far less likely to be a game you’ve heard of and would have been willing to spend money on in the first place.
Ew. Time to switch to BSD.
Ew epic games
I’m sure I’ll get shredded for this, but I don’t understand what everyone is so mad about. This is a net good thing that will raise Linux awareness and adoption. You don’t have to install the Epic Launcher or Fortnite and its anticheat if you don’t want to. And if you’re worried about the kernel level change - if that is what’s required - then compile your kernel without it. Or don’t load the module if that’s how it’s implemented. And “working with distributions” doesn’t even make sense. The kernel is the kernel. I know there are variations, but that does not a distribution make. If you don’t want the change, fork it and remove it. Or just use the fork where some one else did it for you. This is the whole point of Linux. It belongs to all of us and for each of us to the way we want.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
What Epic wants to do is make it so their game only runs if the kernel and its modules are all signed by an approved partner, hence the “working with distributions” bit. You wouldn’t be able to run any game with EAC if you customized your system setup, which includes running third-party drivers for your GPU, sound, and/or network cards, something that’s sometimes necessary on Linux due to poor manufacturer support.
Their “solution” to this is to suggest you make two boot entries - one for your actual system, and a second, locked-down one that passes attestation to play their games. That’s a huge ask for a game whose playerbase is mainly children.
Nuke it from orbit.
