Ironically the only way I would ever consider robust anti-cheet is if the game installed a seperate bootable Linux witch didn't have the encryption keys for my main partition.

you may be on to something here. "you want to play our game, boot it off a usb drive"

Does windows make it easy to tell the installer wants to install kernel anti cheat? It used to pop up the generic binary "This application wants to change files on your computer" which could be installing in the protected "Program Files" or could be modifying anything.

I dont think you can even load the "windows" kernel module in wine. Last time i tried with the capcom rootkit, it didnt work at all.

Wine doesn't emulate the NT kernel; Just the NT and Win32 userspace APIs. For example, Wine provides a `kernel32.dll` that maps API calls into the appropriate Linux ones. Anything kernel level is operating "below" Wine.

I read the person I was responding to saying they avoided games with root kits for moral, not technical, reasons. So I assumed they were on Windows, and AFAIK, windows just offers binary "changes" permissions which covers anything from installing in the slightly protected Program Files directory to installing a rootkit. In other words, can they even detect they are about to install a root kit?

Good question and one I am now looking into