Will Battlefield 6 fully support playing on Linux? I read something about anti-cheat, but as it is 2025 and even e-sports titles like The Finals are handling anti-cheat on Linux fine, this is just a bad excuse.
The only reason for not supporting Linux would be pure developer laziness and I want to believe that the people working on Battlefield 6 at as competent as the devs of The Finals, although they have a lot of ex-Dice people over there.
Any updates on Linux support besides the usual anti-cheat stuff that has obviously nothing to do with supporting Linux or not?
It is NOT pure developer laziness! The BF6 developers/EA had no choice but to implement these new requirements because of constant hacks cheats and exploits by unethical people. Gamers complain when game makers don't try hard enough to stop cheaters and then when those devs try to do the right thing people like you chime in that they are lazy without actually knowing why Linux has this issue and go straight to blaming the wrong people.
I'm no IT pro but it took only an hour trying to find proper TPM 2.0 firmware update and proper update tool to patch TPM vulnerabilities. I Simply patched current 2.0 module to most current version which took 5 minutes to update the module. Then took 5 min to download and update my UEFI firmware for my motherboard. Then 15 minutes to enable both secure boot functions and TPM and TMP and confirm everything was working properly. Total of not even 2 hours to do my part for the benefit of BF6 Anti cheat by implement secure boot and the bonus is my pc is now more secure for things not related to games!
I'm sure some companies devs would rather just sit on their *** and take the EZ route but NOT but bad actors gave them no other choice. So rather than being lazy/greedy by creating yet another crappy prematurely released buggy exploitable cheat ladened game just to sell more copies and get richer they decided on quality over quantity instead of lining their pockets. The additional toolset of secure boot and TPM is needed to better enforce or investigate cheat reports leading to a more enjoyable user experience. What BF6 is doing is setting a higher standard for themselves and will result in better future cheat blocking mechanisms/detection methods to keep up with modern advanced cheat methods. It minimizes the risk and the number of cheats getting past in the first place and a solid foundation to any good Anti cheat system. This deters & helps properly monitor to better ensure dishonest players are not easily getting around the Anti cheat by loading modified unofficial uncertified drivers at boot time.
By the way it's not the fault of EA or the DEVS that Linux don't properly support secure boot/TPM. Linux is open source so there are many different compilations from different dev teams and/or diff communities all together. Because of there being so many different versions and/or builds of LINUX, those Linux devs were lazy and took the EZ route and utilized exploit that at the time existed to make a workaround to load unofficial uncertified and possibly unsafe drivers by using now expiring/expired security keys which are used byTPM/UEFI Bios to properly authenticate the loading of official unmodified drivers. All Linux communities would have to work together to create a unified universal key and issue it for Linux and insure there is a list of secure certified drivers to boot to. UEFI Bios and TPM firmware would need to be updated by hardware vendors? maybe?
I'm no IT pro but it took only an hour trying to find proper TPM 2.0 firmware update and proper update tool to patch TPM vulnerabilities. I Simply patched current 2.0 module to most current version which took 5 minutes to update the module. Then took 5 min to download and update my UEFI firmware for my motherboard. Then 15 minutes to enable both secure boot functions and TPM and TMP and confirm everything was working properly.
Well the problem is not exactly what you think it is. Cheats for games, are more popular on windows side of things, because its a business. Cheats and hack are sold for money on the windows side by the people who make them. Where as on the linux side cheats and hacks are open source, so it's not to hard patch the exploits plus those that work on hacks and cheats don't do linux is for that reason. It simply to them no profitable when hacks and cheats are open source and as such generally are free to grab. Of course the ethics and morals of downloading them and using is disgusting, but the fact its open source makes it easier to deal with them. Then there are ways to stop it that doesn't need client side anti cheat that has kernel level access, and it can be done server side.
But the important part on the secure boot issue isn't because linux is fragmented or devs are lazy. Its just that Linux and Windows are fundamentally different things. Windows is more like monolithic with different levels to its kernel, where as linux kernel is modular with no levels or rings which most client side anti-cheat software uses. Secure boot doesn't work for linux because it does its boot process differently than windows, with secure boot mostly being a windows exclusive tool that distros can't utilize as it requires a lot of money to get a distro to work with secure boot (most distros are managed by nonprofits, and most only utilize open source code which secure boot violates).
Also I wouldn't say TPM or secure boot is watertight as microsoft claims to be when you got people who've invest money or just the will to find ways to circumvent (both can circumvented already at this point). Not to mention that people with older systems would theoritcally be unable to play the game if it requires tpm, considering that is why windows 11 has had such a lot adoption rate because people are hanging on to older computer systems (we even have people who still use windows 7, and actively maintain it so it can still play modern games). Which seems counter intuitive when the game can run on a nvidia geforce 1660 and EA betting hard on a game that run on oldest kind of hardware with heavy optimization for launch. Telling these users to buy a new computer won't do much either when prices for a new one or one moderately up to date costs so much right now.
Linux is way safer than windows. Its open source, its always being diligently watched over and comb by thousands of devs. The only 2 times someone tried to sneak malware into the linux kernel got caught almost instantly and the issues dealt with way faster than microsoft with windows. Windows a black box, how it works and operates is unknown. So bugs and exploit can hide within it and you send with issues where printer stool function meant anyone could remotely access your computer and wasn't fixed for nearly a year after it was discovered. Until then we had to disable printing functions on windows 10 and older because its all the same code like an old building getting a new floor built atop of it.
Linux and windows are fundamentally different to each other meaning differences in how they work. Secure boot is just a fancy tool that only works for windows because it cost so much to get certificates for your linux distro to work with it and it can at randomly break it. Of course there are things like WINE and proton that makes games run on linux which is fine, but to say that linux is the unsafe is dubious when you have organizations of people watching everything that goes into linux and heavy scrutiny from some lone dev doing it in their free time to companies like AMD, NVIDIA, Google, etc. that pay devs to do that work as well. Windows on the other hand is a black box, it has shown to have problems and those problems are catching up with it.
Valve is also investing heavily into linux with SteamOS, and into projects like wayland, arch foundation, etc to so that linux can have the infrastructure that will make it easier to play games on linux and easier for games that use invasive anti-cheat be able to provide a fun gaming experience and the protections need to ensure you don't get hackers or cheaters. So its kinda dumb if EA decides not to find other ways to let linux player play the game, and would be dumber if they decide to claim that cheaters are on linux when money for cheats and hacks is in windows.
p.s. Also having a kernel level anti-cheat is a recipe for disaster anyways when its running on elevated position within windows where it can break the system if something goes wrong. Consider cloud strike when it's security software ran at kernel level and broke because of a bad hacky live patched pushed to computer systems crashing them.
The lack of knowledge in your side is far and I don't blame you.
Just enabling secure boot / TPM not directly making your computer more secure.
"implement secure boot and the bonus is my pc is now more secure for things not related to games" Its not making anything more secure.
If you want make your computer more secure using secure boot you should do it with more secure ways then just enabling it.
1. Secure boot required you to sign every piece of software you use even if its a software you creates (Developer).
2. Softwares that are not signed by Big vendors like "GlobalSign", "Sectigo (Comodo), Digicert and some more vendors like this will never work on your computer with secure boot.
3. Its not that hard to bypass secureboot if you're not signing your bios and locking it with signed key for booting the system.
4. TPM is not part of microsoft they just use it in windows 11.
5. Anti cheat systems should never be client side from my opinion. Users should decide what to install and what not install on their own systems. It should always be server sided from my opinion.
6. EA Just love to make games that fails to comply with other OSs just like Nvidia and Apple and Microsoft.
7. A lot of the cheats programs are signed today by certificates so it wouldn't matter.
8. Even Microsoft converted their cloud to Linux and also created WSL (Windows subsystem Linux) because their OS sucks especially for devs.
You’re kinda missing the real issue here, and it’s making this sound way more black-and-white than it actually is.
Linux does support Secure Boot and TPM. That part isn’t up for debate. It’s been a thing for years, and plenty of distros already ship signed bootloaders, support TPM 2.0, disk encryption, measured boot, all of that. The problem isn’t that Linux “can’t do it” — it’s that Linux doesn’t just hand full kernel control to third-party anti-cheat software by default. That’s a conscious design choice, not laziness or a lack of capability.
Also, Secure Boot and TPM don’t stop most cheating anyway. They only protect the boot process. Most modern cheats happen after the system has already started — memory manipulation, external hardware, DMA devices, VM tricks, logic exploits, you name it. Windows games that require Secure Boot, TPM, and kernel anti-cheat still have tons of cheaters, so clearly this isn’t the magic fix it’s being sold as.
Your “it only took me an hour to enable TPM” story is kind of beside the point too. Nobody is arguing that turning it on is hard. The issue is EA choosing an anti-cheat approach that’s deeply tied to Windows internals instead of using solutions that already work cross-platform. Games are doing this right now — including competitive shooters — and they’re not collapsing under cheaters because of it.
And blaming Linux devs for being “lazy” just doesn’t hold up. Linux is open by design. Users control their machines. That’s the whole point. A single universal key controlled by publishers or anti-cheat vendors wouldn’t be “more secure,” it’d be a massive downgrade in trust and user ownership. The flexibility you’re calling a flaw is literally why Linux is trusted in servers, infrastructure, and security-critical systems.
At the end of the day, EA didn’t “have no choice.” They made a choice. It’s a business and tooling decision — one that favors Windows and kernel-level enforcement because it’s easier for them, not because Linux is incapable or unsafe. Calling that inevitability doesn’t make it true.
So yeah, cheating sucks and devs should fight it — but pretending this is all Linux’s fault just doesn’t line up with how the tech actually works.
Great summary of the finer points in the unfortunate decisions made that affect BF6. It's why I'm still looking for a competitive shooter that'll work on Linux.
I agree, it's not linux's fault. Nothing other than the owner of the pc should have control over their pc plain and simple. There are some crazy smart people out there and if they want to cheat they will find a way. I love playing battlefield but unfortunately I have no way to do so as I left the Microsoft ecosystem years ago and pc life has been so much better with far less issues. My choice to never touch the mess called windows has ultimately been a decision to not support companies that embrace the Microsoft practices and thus limits my ability to enjoy games I used to enjoy. I agree cheaters suck but it would be nice if they could create a server side mechanism that can filter out those using the highly restrictive kernal level anti cheats and those running software based or no anti cheats and allow only those running the anti cheat structure matching to play together and not mix. That way those that don't want to give kernel level access to still play while having the understanding of the possibility of more cheaters and leave the choice up to the player to play with anti cheat players only or accept they may play with cheaters otherwise. Leave the choice to the player!
