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.
