Linux for gaming, is this a good time to jump the windows boat?

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Re: Linux for gaming, is this a good time to jump the windows boat?

Post by Panos » Sun, 12. Sep 21, 09:42

red assassin wrote:
Thu, 2. Sep 21, 17:34
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Re: Linux for gaming, is this a good time to jump the windows boat?

Post by Hank001 » Sun, 19. Sep 21, 17:36

This might be a bit outside of just the gaming issue, but touches on the larger issues concerned with Linux OS(s).

This is about using linux virtual machines to run older versions of the Windows OS and the trouble it caused me. It's a precautionary take (or should be).

At one point I was running Linux VMs for Windows XP 32 bit, 64 bit, Win 7 and 8.1. These operated perfectly and I was happy overall with their stability. Until motherboard problems on the host machine cropped up.

Linux VMs by their very nature are very machine specific. The motherboard build itself used capacitors that "dried out" with age of but two years and after trying two replacements and they too proved useless for the same issues I tried and tried different ways to again run the VM's on newer systens and always ran into failure because the VM's would not recognize the new host system.

More savvy among you might ask; "What's the problem? Just...". I did and it didn't work. To the point of the experts saying that even pulling the Windows builds out of the VM's was not possible as they too were imbedded in the Linux host's code. (The Windows builds themselves and their virtual drives were imbedded within large Linux files). Trying to change this to run on a different system would have meant finding and changing thousands of lines of code!

So my advice is this: Do Not Virtualize Windows on Linux unless you know you can migrate the VMs to other Linux based machines!
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Re: Linux for gaming, is this a good time to jump the windows boat?

Post by jlehtone » Sun, 19. Sep 21, 23:19

I would read your tale if I had more salt at hand.

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Re: Linux for gaming, is this a good time to jump the windows boat?

Post by Hank001 » Sun, 19. Sep 21, 23:27

:mrgreen: Okay it's a bit long. Sorry.
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Re: Linux for gaming, is this a good time to jump the windows boat?

Post by Tempest » Tue, 21. Sep 21, 16:07

i've gone back to windows 10 (still trying to push the 5800x beyond "out-of-box" spec, easier access to troubleshooting tools imho)

But. my personal experience was pretty great on the 1st try (Manjaro + native steam) X4 seemed to run perfectly fine, if not better then windows ever did. something silly, but as an example: Terratech on steam. ALWAYS stuttered on the windows machine intermittently, completely fine on Linux.

there is the issue of non-native linux games though (some old, some newer) heres to hoping for a massive shift towards the other end of the O.S. spectrum for gaming in general (props to the guys at Egosoft atleast)

Definitely not liking the way windows seems to be heading. (advertising platform/data-mining aparatus with an O.S. slapped on top of it)
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Re: Linux for gaming, is this a good time to jump the windows boat?

Post by pjknibbs » Tue, 21. Sep 21, 18:56

Tempest wrote:
Tue, 21. Sep 21, 16:07
i've gone back to windows 10 (still trying to push the 5800x beyond "out-of-box" spec, easier access to troubleshooting tools imho)
I still have Linux on the under-TV computer because it seems to work well enough, but I've reverted my cheapo HP laptop back to Windows because it kept hanging for no readily apparent reason under Linux. Rock-solid stable on Windows, no issues at all.

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Re: Linux for gaming, is this a good time to jump the windows boat?

Post by felter » Fri, 22. Oct 21, 16:24

Has anyone tried using a Linux programme called Bottles to run Windows apps/programmes on Linux, it would also be interesting to know how it handles Windows games, as it has a gaming environment.
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Re: Linux for gaming, is this a good time to jump the windows boat?

Post by pjknibbs » Fri, 22. Oct 21, 16:48

Can't say I have, I've pretty much given up on desktop Linux for...well, frankly I lost count since I first tried the OS out in 1995. Why is it easier to run Android applications on Bluestacks (an Android emulator on Windows) than any Linux-based emulator I found? Android is freakin' based on Linux, you'd think it would be trivial!

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Re: Linux for gaming, is this a good time to jump the windows boat?

Post by BaronVerde » Fri, 22. Oct 21, 19:29

Apart from being "based on Linux" it hasn't much in common with full Linux implementations.It is also full of proprietary software from google and others, and lacks many of the security features that make up Linux. It may well be that a full Linux doesn't run Android apps when they try to things in areas where they should keep their hands off, I mean other than the current user space.

I only play native Linux games. I would go so far to advise people not to install undocumented 3rd party applications, which incudes clients like steam and gog, emulation layers other than pure wine (but even then I'd rather use windows if I must play windows games). I also dislike Linux versions like the Ubuntus or specifically adapted ones like steam os out of distrust they may concentrate on more than mere functionality.

For me, the power of pure Linux lies (besides the fully documented dev environment even for beginners) in the higher safety margin which may easily be compromised by software other than that from the repositories, even with the use of e.g. google chrome because suid sandbox. I haven't seen a single Linux hack yet that didn't either need physical access to the machine, or the user to actively install a root kit or otherwise mess up security, like working as root. I also do not install software tat needs root rights during installation, a sure sign that something is fishy !

We can't be sure in those cases that something like a rootkit isn't included, something that runs outside of the user space and doesn't belong to the core os as from the repositories, rootkits got a revival lately I read. And yet another thing arises when the digital signatures can be compromised, or when hard- or firmware offer backdoors. We must disconnect totally, then, if we want privacy.

Another thing is, all those layers of middle ware and emulation introduce new possibilities for errors and conditions were debugging gets ever harder. We start running after updates that may kill one error and introduce another instead. I prefer a stable system with only security updaes, until the next release.


It is of course a personal decision to say I don't care about supervision and data kraken, privacy is an illusion and I don't need a stable system, I just want to play.

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Re: Linux for gaming, is this a good time to jump the windows boat?

Post by red assassin » Fri, 22. Oct 21, 23:30

BaronVerde wrote:
Fri, 22. Oct 21, 19:29
[Android] lacks many of the security features that make up Linux.
This is actively backwards - Android has a much stricter permissions model for applications than Linux does. Other than your web browser, I'd be shocked if any of the applications you run with your user permissions are constrained by sandboxing, SELinux rules, etc, whereas all Android apps are strictly sandboxed, with a permissions model for access to anything sensitive. You install a random Linux app without ever granting it elevated permissions and it can absolutely freely read all of your sensitive files etc without ever needing to elevate to root because it's still running as your user; Android doesn't work that way. That you hear more about Android security issues than desktop Linux is simply because Android has a thousand times the userbase.

None of that is to suggest that Google don't have a very high degree of access to your Android phone, of course, but to suggest that Android's security model vs somebody other than your OS vendor is weaker than desktop Linux is absolutely untrue. (You trust the maintainers of your distro just as much as an Android user does Google, by the way. You're going to say "something something open source", but when was the last time anybody verified every one of the literally billions of lines of code making up the average Linux distro, or even verified that the binary packages actually match the published source code?)
I haven't seen a single Linux hack yet that didn't either need physical access to the machine, or the user to actively install a root kit or otherwise mess up security, like working as root.
lol? See "code execution" and "gain privileges" columns. A few of those are Android specific, but most aren't.


Honestly, security is complicated. As an individual desktop user, your risk exposure as a Linux user is probably a lot lower than other OSes just because, realistically, there's hardly any of us so nobody cares enough to target you. But don't confuse that with the OS being more inherently secure, because it isn't.
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Re: Linux for gaming, is this a good time to jump the windows boat?

Post by BaronVerde » Sat, 23. Oct 21, 00:24

Sandboxing, done the google way with a suid sandbox, actually circumvents Linux user space restrictions. It is not a security feature, but a root kit. They promised for more than decade to change it, don't know if that has happened by now. Linux/Unix has its sandboxes they are called user space and circumventing the by software only creates backdoors and rootkits.

Any Linux/Unix is many many times times more secure in every aspect than Android. Android is a catastrophe, a cheap farce of an OS. Thought was common knowledge, but I let you guys go out on a search.

Your list, in the section 2021, confirm that attacker needs local access and/or modification of system files is not possible.

Linux isn't invulnerable, that's sure.

And yeah, I was imprecise. With Linux hack I meant "get root privileges" without physical access or user aid installing unsafe software. I have yet to see it. At best the exploit vector was unknown, as in a recently reported hack linked to professional (Isreali ?) corporation whose name I forgot. Sure, if people run a google chrome browser with the suid sandbox anyone in between with the power to modify the file and its sigature can gain root access, simply because the file has root privileges on execution. But one doesn't install such nonsense.

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Re: Linux for gaming, is this a good time to jump the windows boat?

Post by red assassin » Sat, 23. Oct 21, 00:36

Chrome hasn't used the setuid sandbox since the kernel introduced suitable sandboxing mechanisms in 3.10 (2013). It uses user namespaces and seccomp-bpf. Firefox uses the same mechanism.

You could try providing some actual citations or examples for Android being less secure than "any Linux/Unix", rather than everyone's favourite "do your own research". It's not true.

"The user never runs any unsafe software" is an incredibly optimistic security perspective - the vast majority of malware affecting other OSes starts with the user running something they shouldn't as well! - but sure, desktop Linux gets RCEs as well: https://ubuntu.com/security/notices/USN-3806-1 https://ubuntu.com/security/notices/USN-3807-1
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Re: Linux for gaming, is this a good time to jump the windows boat?

Post by BaronVerde » Sat, 23. Oct 21, 01:04

Well, that's a bi like asking textbook knowledge. A smart phone OS and one that runs on supercomputers (I am not talking of other mobile Linux distributions which may be worse than Android) may have a common genetic heritage, but not actually much functional overlap.

And yes, it is my opinion as well that the user (me right here) is the biggest risk, and that's why I advised against any installation aside from the OS repositories and maybe a well reputed game or two. People shouldn't give the control away, to google, steam, or others.

Linux is a multi-user (10s of thousands) OS and a user is without higher intervention not able to install software outside their space. For that there are configurable user rights which the administrators must set up. That's not trivial and multilayered, but you certainly know that.

Btw. google chrome still used the suid sandbox in 2020 (own check and I think it is still used as a fallback), they say it is not yet completely removed. https://chromium.googlesource.com/chrom ... lopment.md

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Re: Linux for gaming, is this a good time to jump the windows boat?

Post by red assassin » Sat, 23. Oct 21, 10:39

You seem to have much better textbooks than I do, so for my benefit please list some of those security features that are present in a modern supercomputer Linux distro and a modern version of Android.

Google still provide the setuid sandbox to support kernels which don't support user namespaces, yes. It's certainly not ideal as a sandboxing mechanism, but it's better than nothing, which is the alternative on kernels that don't provide real sandboxing features! As the issue linked from that link says, the sandbox helper binary there isn't required if you're not on a kernel that needs it, and hasn't been since 2016.
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Re: Linux for gaming, is this a good time to jump the windows boat?

Post by BaronVerde » Sat, 23. Oct 21, 11:33

Without going into details because much is not publicly disclosed - contrary to the common opinion it was an open source OS - by google and google controls the apps that run on it. And frankly, no idea how one can assume that there is no difference. You can even bake your own kernel in Linux, harden it with the features you like and need, strip it down or blow it up. With Android you're stuck to what Google gives you to eat.

Android isn't really open source:
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/android-r ... ce-matter/

There's another main difference from a user pov, imo the one that makes it an absolute nono: Software installed from the repositories of one of the Linux distributions like Debian (and many, but not all of its derivatives), Suse, RHEL, etc. are up to now safe to install without ado. On Debian one can choose between pure open source (depending on manufacturers helpfulness or absence thereof), contributions and non-free software. Also between 3 rollouts, one that has the latest features but may be unstable, one that is in testing but reasonably stable, and one that feature frozen and only receives security updates but may lack some modern features and specific support of hardware. The Android market place is not safe, in contrary. You catch everything from trackers to keyboard readout, and you have that in the news every other day (switch search engine if not).

Malware in the google store (just the first hit out of many):
https://arstechnica.com/information-tec ... id-market/

Of course not all is known because of the partly closed sources in Android, but there have been and speculatively still are a lot of vectors to take over an Android device with remote access. Such things do, (for now and to my knowledge) not exist on Linux:

Hackers can take over Android devices without notice:
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/05 ... abilities/

... and the list goes on.

--------------
So, yeah, I'm as sorry as necessary :-) But apart from the initial use of a Linus kernel Android hasn't much in common with any full Linux implementation. But I am genuinely interested, why do you think that there are no or little differences ? Seems like a very far fetched assumption to me, given the code base, the philosophy, and the target audience as well as hardware bases ...

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Re: Linux for gaming, is this a good time to jump the windows boat?

Post by red assassin » Sat, 23. Oct 21, 16:08

Mostly you're confusing the level of interest in targeting a given OS with the actual security of said OS. Android has over three billion active devices - of course there's an enormous amount of interest in compromising it! Desktop Linux has an install base of millions of devices at best, so by comparison there's very little interest in targeting it. Server Linux is a lot more prevalent, but there's a great variety of server Linux malware out there (and those links are by no means a comprehensive literature review!).

As far as your specific issues go:

You can build an open source version of Android if you want; there's various projects doing this, of which the biggest is probably LineageOS. Most people don't do that, but most Linux users don't alter anything significant from their chosen distro either. This is a philosophical issue rather than a security issue anyway: the main factor that influences security is whether the primary maintainers/contributors take security seriously, not whether the code is open. It's very easy to assume that open source code is safe because people are looking at it, but if there's one thing that should have become clear after everything from Heartbleed to the FreeBSD Wireguard drama (which specifically calls out it being almost impossible to get a code review for FreeBSD kernel commits!), it's that people generally aren't looking unless they get paid to do it. By contrast, closed source OSes like Windows and iOS have made enormous security improvements over the last decade. Linux has too, but only with an enormous amount of corporate sponsorship of security research. This isn't necessarily to disagree with open source code in a philosophical sense, but it's not a security panacea. Likewise, you may not be comfortable with Google's level of control over the OS and your data - for good reason! - but if you use Android you're choosing to agree to that trade. Indeed, this has security benefits too - Google's TAG is the reason you know about the "vectors to take over an Android device with remote access" you refer to in the first place. Is anybody looking for that on your Linux system?

Relatedly, the assumption that all code in the repositories for major distros is automatically safe is flawed. You're assuming that nobody's able to introduce backdoored or deliberately vulnerable code into a package somewhere in the billions of lines of code that the distro ships, and that nobody's compromised or altered the distro's build servers to introduce stuff that doesn't show up in the source code. (See SolarWinds.) Of course, there certainly is malicious stuff in the Play Store, but there's also over three billion users demanding an endless stream of apps for their devices: if you had three billion users and millions of developers building apps for desktop Linux, stuff would slip through as well. And Android's permissions model limits what a malicious app can do in a way that is completely not true of desktop Linux. Apps have to specifically ask for permissions to get sensitive things like your location, access shared files like your music and downloads, etc. Keyboards have to explicitly register themselves as keyboards, which comes with a bunch of warnings about being able to read your input. Apps don't have access to each others' files, so it's not possible for a malicious app to, say, lift the contents of your email inbox (which is stored in an app-specific sandboxed storage which other apps can't access). None of this is true on desktop Linux: you run one thing you weren't supposed to, or which was vulnerable to something, and it can entirely freely lift all your data. Server Linux is better - you'd typically run different services as different users, and increasingly in different sandboxed containers - but of course a server is far more exposed than an end user device anyway.

I'm certainly not claiming that Android doesn't have security issues - all software has security issues - but Android is better than you think it is and desktop Linux is worse.
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Re: Linux for gaming, is this a good time to jump the windows boat?

Post by Vertigo 7 » Sat, 23. Oct 21, 17:32

You're not even touching on the IoT devices running Linux and Android that are often poorly maintained by both the users and manufacturers.
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Re: Linux for gaming, is this a good time to jump the windows boat?

Post by BaronVerde » Sat, 23. Oct 21, 18:53

@red assassin, nonsense, I am not confusing nothing. Let's stay on topic.

There is lot of Linux malware for desktops and servers and even rootkits that but all need the user to actively install them or the attacker to have local access. That can easily be avoided by simply not installing the package that says click here to install me,, even if it is from google. Windows and Android can be taken over from outside without any active help from its users.

@Verigo 7:We are taling about classic desktop Linux (here: Debian, RHEL, Suse, etc.) replicating Unix, not any derivatives with stripped and changed functionality, which certainly are unsafe. Android, which belongs to the latter, is the exception here. There are hundreds if not thousands of "Linuxes" that have little or nothing in common with the unixoid family of operating systems that run on PCs, Servers and other machines.

Again, a Linux desktop or server takeover without any help from inside or the hacker having local access has still to be made, which is not the case for Windows and Android, right ?

Whataboutism aside, ny initial argument was and is: avoid undocumented sofware, use Linux with the repositories of the distribution only. An exception from that advice is only software that you can absolutely trust. That'll be the graphics driver (hopefully), the game you're playing (hopefully), maybe a bought specific software package (for astronomy software for me).

When the underlying hardware is holey (Intel a bit more than amd), then this is of course somewhat in vain.

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Re: Linux for gaming, is this a good time to jump the windows boat?

Post by BaronVerde » Sat, 23. Oct 21, 19:23

@red assassin wrote:
"Relatedly, the assumption that all code in the repositories for major distros is automatically safe is flawed. You're assuming that nobody's able to introduce backdoored or deliberately vulnerable code into a package somewhere in the billions of lines of code that the distro ships"

Please read up how the code base of the Linux kernel and a distribution like Debian are maintained. Just recently, an American university has been thrown out of kernel dev because they tried repeatedly to introduce bad code just to prove something, were caught, tried again, were thrown out. So, your argument that there is no 100% certainty may be right , but it is pretty high. Much higher than any closed source system where nobody really knows what's in it and a mere disclosure of part of the (15 year old) codebase is seen as a security risk.

Hoy ridiculous, from the view point of an os OS :-) There's something to it to trust that way more than the closed one ;-)

-------------

Edit: I would like to underline the point "Why is Linux safer than Windows" with a few links of mixed origin that are more elaborate on the matter, because it helps the thread advance somewhat:

Why Linux ?

https://www.pcworld.com/article/508291/ ... ndows.html

https://www.lifewire.com/windows-vs-linux-mint-2200609

https://medium.com/codex/5-reasons-why- ... 036c3d3324

Why not Linux ?

- A user should learn a bit how to oparate the OS. That can be fun for some, or frustrating for others.
- Games aren't a strength of plain Linux. That gets better with clients like Steam, emulators like wine, or specially fabricated Linux versions like Steam OS. On the danger of the above mentioned effects on security, that is to saygive up much of why people switched in the first plac: to achiee higher security.
- drivers for latest and shiny hardware and peripherals lack behind windows for people who insist on it.

But that's about it, imo. Nearly all every day software is available on Linux as well, and installation is just a iso download, boot and click "automatic install".
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Re: Linux for gaming, is this a good time to jump the windows boat?

Post by red assassin » Sat, 23. Oct 21, 19:43

No, you are: you're asserting that because you're not aware of a full remote compromise of a Linux desktop, one is not possible because the OS is inherently more secure. But that's nonsense.

Firstly, I already linked two examples of Linux desktop (and server!) remote compromises from recent years, but here they are again, with exploit details in case you didn't believe they're exploitable:
https://www.exploit-db.com/exploits/44890 "DynoRoot" for NetworkManager in Red Hat-likes
https://conference.hitb.org/hitbsecconf ... ilhelm.pdf CVE-2018-15688 for systemd networkd

Secondly, with a relative handful of users of desktop Linux, there are few people out there who are interested in building remote compromises, and also few people looking to see if anybody else has. That doesn't mean it isn't possible, it just means popular platforms get more attention.

Thirdly, you cannot rely on users never running anything they shouldn't, never losing any credentials, and no apps they use ever having vulnerabilities in. People make mistakes. Trusted services get compromised. Security needs to be layered and assume that other layers will fail, because ultimately shit happens. re the university that was trying to get vulnerable code into the Linux kernel... sure, the biggest open source project in the world backed - financially and with developer effort - by nearly every major tech firm might notice. But even then the number of CVEs in the Linux kernel demonstrates a lot of vulnerable code is getting in, deliberately or otherwise. And Debian has about 200,000 packages in its repositories. How confident are you that every line of source code in every one of those packages has been reviewed by somebody trained enough and paying enough attention to spot issues? Many of them are projects supported by a couple of developers in their free time, and highly trained security researchers don't find every bug on the first try either.
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