this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2023
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It's built on Linux. Specifically Arch Linux. So no, there's nothing they could have done to lock it down to prevent piracy. Not even if they wanted to.
So what? Orbis (the PlayStation OS) is built on FreeBSD, but there's still anti piracy on the PS5.
They could have:
Believe me, if they wanted to try, they could have.
actually making linux usable with the deck controls was probably more work than locking the users out of the desktop mode even
You got me there. Doing stuff like that on other platforms like the Switch totally prevented piracy, so I suppose it's a good thing they didn't do it on a system that thousands of devs know down to the kernel without having to reverse engineer.
You said prevent, not eliminate. There's tens of thousands of ways to prevent piracy. They are not infallible, but they are preventatives.
There is nothing on this earth that will eliminate piracy.
Where would you like to move the goalposts now?
Anytime you're reduced to arguing semantics, it's not even an argument worth engaging in. So I'm not going to bother responding further to you.
That's not moving goalposts, you're just arguing semantics. People generally think of eliminate when they say prevent in this kind of conversation....
If anything if they went "prevention" and not "eliminate" like in your sense...it would be even dumber because it would just make the steamdeck a more restrictive x86-processor computer compared to the systems people were already comparing it to up until it's release
Imagine how it would've gone down if people were saying "Of course you can do that, it's a PC" if people responded with "Yeah, except it's 10x harder to do things you could normally do on PC". They wanted it to be close to how a PC is, it was part of the advertising campaign.
If you think that the goal of anti piracy measures is to be an impenetrable barrier, you've completely misunderstood the assignment.
The idea isn't to be literally impossible, but to be so hard to do that even the moderate tech heads won't bother.
The likes of Nintendo don't care if 12 people are pirating their games, what they want to prevent is situations line the PlayStation Portable, where almost everyone was cracking that fucker wide open and there was a shit ton of piracy.
Nintendo is incompetent.
PS5 and Xbox both control what runs on their systems perfectly fine.
Nintendo was super competent with the Switch, their kernel is actually ridiculously secure. I'm pretty sure if Nvidia hadn't messed up, we would still be scratching our heads with the Switch.
They could have not given you root access and forced you to install your own OS for it to manage things that aren't on Steam. They could have locked the bootloader and refused to install anything they didn't sign.
Neither would violate the license provided they made the source available.
Android is built on linux yet it is increasingly locked down and many phones are extremely difficult to get root access on.
So Valve could have followed the phone ecosystem path and pushed as much of the feature set as proprietary code as possible (binary blob drivers, proton proprietary instead of bsd), replaced pacman with a valve controlled package manager & repos, setup selinux to give users no power to do anything and made the deck only able to secure boot steamOS signed by Valve. Technical users may be able to jail break such a device but the majority would not be inclined to.
Valve's wisdom here is in realizing that the majority are going to buy their games anyway but if you don't lock the device down then most of the technical users will also buy most of their games whereas if you have to go out of your way to jail break a device to install something fun then that device basically becomes a piracy only device from that point on.
Sure there is, they could have not built it on Arch Linux
Tell me you don't know how to administer Linux without telling me you don't know how to administer Linux.
I don't administer Linux, I use Linux. Unless you're conflating being an end user with being an administrator, in which case I would say that's a rather pretentious way to put it. Nobody walks around saying they administer Windows because they have a laptop. It sounds stupid.
Right, so you don't know what you're talking about and shouldn't speak authoritatively on the subject.
I drive a car every day, but that doesn't mean I can speak authoritatively on how its transmission works.
But, I am a senior SecOps engineer (like a systems engineer but also a cyber security expert) working mostly with Linux, and I can authoritatively say that you're mistaken about Valve's ability to block piracy in Linux.
The point is just using it gives you no experience to talk about how easy it is to lock down an OS, administering one does. EatYouWell is absolutely right in calling out that you don't administer linux, as you say yourself: you don't, you use it. And that difference shows in the falsehood of your comment: it is possible to lock down Linux to levels like a PS5 and anyone administering Linux would know that from their knowledge of the underlying components.
There's a lot they could have done, locking down Linux isn't that hard. Just look at Chrome OS, it's based on Gentoo, yet it's locked down completely. All they had.to do is lock the BIOS, enable secure boot and disable root access, and then it's pretty much a locked system.
They could have not built it on arch linux. They made decisions that were pro-consumer and thus they did not need to make decisions that were anti piracy
And instead of doubling-down in denial, they embraced the openness.