EA claims that Linux is a path to a variety impactful exploits, cheats and Apex Legends.

Steam Deck shooters, bad news: Electronic Arts determined that Linux was "a path for various impactful exploits and hacks" in Apex Legends and has decided to block access to the game by anyone using this OS.

The Apex anti-cheat team explained its decision by writing in an update that "the openness of Linux makes it attractive for cheaters and cheat developer."

"Linux cheats can be harder to detect, and the data shows they are growing at an alarming rate. This requires a large amount of attention and focus from the team. In some cases, cheats for Windows OS are emulated on Linux to make it harder to detect and prevent.

It is not a small thing to cut off a whole branch of players, but the anticheats team said that it had to balance "greater health", of the overall Apex players base, with the number legitimate players on Linux. The anti-cheat team wrote that, "while the number of Linux users was small, they had a significant impact on a lot of players' games."

Apex is no longer playable on Linux systems, including Steam Deck. Apex Legends was previously categorized as "playable," meaning that it "may require manual tweaking by a user to play," and is now listed as unsupported.

The update does not go into the details of why Linux is so popular for cheating or why cheats are so difficult to detect. However, it appears that kernel mode anticheats can be easily worked around in the Linux environment. The anticheat team stated that there is no reliable way to distinguish between a legitimate Steam Deck and a malicious cheat (via Linux) claiming to be Steam Deck.

Others have echoed and expanded on these concerns: In a blog post in April about its Vanguard Anticheat, Riot Games stated that "Linux currently does not afford us enough ability to attest boot states or kernel modules and the difficulty of securing it has only been compounded because all the frustrating differences among distributions."

"Even allowing emulation can be a dangerous game as many cheats will run on the host and manipulate or analyze the VM, in a manner that would not be visible to Vanguard inside it," Riot wrote.

"Half the anti-cheat process is making sure that the environment hasn’t been tampered, and this is very hard on Linux. This is by design. We will leave backdoors open to developers who will use them for cheating. Yesterday, there were only 800 Linux users playing League. We have determined that this risk is not worth the payoff.

The response to the news in the Apex Legends Subreddit has been largely reserved: Some users seem to be naturally upset or angry while others appear to believe the decision was justified. "Staying in a more closed [Windows] ecosystem to protect the game is a deal that I'm willing to make, especially when it comes to more competitive games," wrote redditor BetterProphet5585.

Some players are hoping for a reversal if blocking Linux users has little or no impact. It's already a done deal. If you want to continue playing Apex Legends in your Steam Deck, then you'll have to install Windows.