The kernel level anticheats are almost always written for Windows. They are relevant to gaming on Linux because those games won't work on Linux even if wine/proton run the user space portions fine

From my understanding, if you play an EAC game on Linux with Proton, you're not really running the same EAC as Windows players. You're running a lite version that runs as a regular user and it tries to provide at least some level of protection like verifying game files or detecting anything clearly out of place that it can detect, but obviously it doesn't have the permissions to see everything running on your system or install a kernel module. This does mean cheaters could probably just cheat on Linux to bypass it more easily, so anticheats like EAC will put Linux support as an opt-in toggle which some developers choose not to enable.

Everything says "wants to make changes to your device". I accidentally installed EAC that way.

It's worth noting that when you first install it, steam asks to install a service to assist with its duties, presumably for most install tasks. Steam has been around long enough and that service is now trouble free that it became part of the furniture most ignore as part of the background. That's aside from how users may be trained to hit 'yes' on any permission box that comes up to swat it away and play the game.

> It's worth noting that when you first install it, steam asks to install a service to assist with its duties, presumably for most install tasks.

They do this because Steam was originally designed in the XP era when you could write whatever you want to Program Files without escalating to admin, and instead of refactoring where they put their files when Vista made the permissions more strict they started installing that backdoor service which lets them keep putting everything in Program Files without triggering UAC prompts all the time. It's a pretty gross and unnecessary hack, but I doubt they're ever going to fix it at this point.

I don't think this is why -- Steam actually sets permissions on its subdirectory so that any user can write to it. (This means that while installing mods, for example, I can write to that directory without having to deal with UAC/sudo.)

Although I'm not fully linux knowledgeable, I think they put everything under the user profile in ~/.local/share/Steam for similar reasons so they can do software installs with no elevations. They're not the only ones taking that approach though, it's become common across OSes to offer an easy/quick installer that dumps itself in your user profile because that's seems to matter most to getting users up and running.

Not on Linux. Things are different on Windows, especially if you wanna play competitive games, I'm told.