There have been a few topics here and there, mainly of players being caught in ban sweeps, of users on Linux.
There’s been an unspoken agreement between Blizzard and players who play OW on Linux, but that’s all about to change with Overwatch 2. No where have they stated that the unspoken rule will transfer over to the “new” game, and with Defense Matrix comes, and I quote, "external partners and security vendors who design anti-tamper, anti-cheat, and anti-reverse-engineering technologies. " This will mean any type of circumvention to get the game to work, or flags that are not seen as specifically the Windows operating system, will most likely be recognized and deemed a threat.
There were quite a few who played the Overwatch 2 beta I saw using Linux, but I assume the betas were going through such rapid development, cheating tech wouldn’t really have been viable or an issue for such a small window of play.
I pour one out for the folks who thought they were going to get OW2 on their Steam Decks.
(I would love to be happily proven wrong about all this, however)
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Windows dual boot is still doable
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Unfortunately if you don’t play on an officially supported OS you’re on your own.
There’s no indication of any agreement unspoken or not, they just said it might work. The issue is not that you use Linux per-se, but rather limitations of what can be emulated.
Are you referring to the post from 2018? I think you are misinterpreting the meaning. The unspoken agreement is the fact there was no “No, you can not use linux.” but rather a “Good luck, and we can’t officially support you.”, which is kind of the risk you take with using Linux anyway.
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I think they would keep as is, maybe slightly more tweaks on lutris/proton/wine/dxvk12 to make it run properly
I mean, they are launching on PS4, PS5 and switch. So, the OS per se isn’t the exactly problem, effectively supporting it tho could be.
Installing windows is hard I guess.
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It’s not. I have a bootable partition and a virtual machine running Windows. I would prefer not to use it as my daily driver as what I do on a daily basis is more easily done on Linux. Try installing Linux and tell me Windows is hard to install, lol.
EDIT: Who are you to tell people what kind of operating system they should have?
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Depending on the distro and hardware, linux can be pretty much straightforward. While some situations windows can be really annoying.
Both systems has their own pros and cons. I would love to daily use linux on my PC but several work related stuff simply not allow me to do so.
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I too prefer Linux as my daily driver. If Overwatch isn’t going to run with Proton, I’m not going to play.
it’s exactly the same game engine so no reason to believe it won’t work the same as it does now
Linux isnt meant for gaming but as first comment said dual boot*.
Rip the 3 out of 10 linux users who play Overwatch
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been playing overwatch for the past year on linux, also played both betas and they ran perfectly
if they stated anything about the unspoken rule it wouldn’t be unspoken anymore, no? honestly I think we’ll be fine, one way or another
ignore the “iNsTALL wINdOWs OMG what are you doing” npcs
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They have been video of OW2 beta running on Steam Deck.
proprietary chads win again
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You’re creating a narrative that doesn’t exist. There’s not even any nuance to their statement.
I mean, “unspoken narrative”, you can arbitrarily use that to support any point of view …
It was happenstance that OW worked with your 3rd party compatibility layer.
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“‘Overwatch 2’ Won’t Have Kernel-Level Anti-Cheat Tools, So It Should Run On Steam Deck Just Fine” --Kris Holt @ Forbes, 2022/09/27
… I took the opportunity to ask about whether the game will have kernel-level anti-cheat tools. Short answer: no.
So, if you’re so inclined, you should be able to get Overwatch 2 running on Steam Deck without installing Windows. I’m not the only one who’s looking forward to that.
“We have an engineer on our team who’s really excited,” Overwatch 2 lead software engineer Bill Warnecke told me. “He’s a Linux user on his home desktop and messages me regularly about that how excited he is to play on Steam Deck as well.”
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It’s actually a pain in the hole on the deck atm to get duel booting working since the Linux OS doesn’t natively support it. But tbh, if I wanted to play OW on my Deck I was going to just replace Steam OS anyway with Windows since I’m at my witts end with Linux anyway because I was worried about anti-cheat flags before.
Wow this is huge. So they are basically approving people playing on steam deck.