I don’t quite understand the criticism. It’s not gonna be top of the line, but it’s more than enough to replace my dying laptop from 2015 that I pretty much only ever use like a desktop anyway. And I can save myself the time and effort of picking parts, building, and dealing with shit not working as expected.
If someone is looking for an all-in-one device, it is a valid criticism to point out.
As it stands now SteamOS can’t play the big flavour of the week multiplayer games. If that really matters to you and you don’t have somewhere else to play them, a steam machine isn’t for you.
I dual boot for this reason but default to Linux for everything that works there.
Sounds like the problem is with the game and its developers. There are still cheaters in games with kernel level anticheat. It’s not a substitute for having moderation functions, staff, and reporting functionality. And at that point, you might as well go with something that isn’t invasive rootkit spyware to safeguard your game.
Server-side anti-cheat is the best solution, and doesn’t require any malware on the user’s machine. It’s harder though, and might need beefier servers, so…
If the game structure is actually properly planned, it isnt harder to implement server side anticheat.
The server already has all the info it needs since it gotta sync all the clients anyway, and it is already a authoritative source of truth.
Yet, most modern games codebases are absolute monstrosities of shit piled up, glued up, tacked on with hot glue and a prayer, and shipped. A spaghetti monster, which makes server side anticheat impossible because the codebase is a mess.
And so, because they dont want to spend the time and do things properly, let’s shove everything into the rootkits that are anticheat software