If the status quo doesn’t change, then you’ll be right to have claimed here that the status quo you’ve described won’t change. But that would be worse for all of us. Besides, Linux is an excellent platform for modding games in realtime, no matter what their charts show — so certainly the sealed-attestation stuff would deny them a plausible reason to deny Linux. If Microsoft offered sealed Windows for free, they’d deny unsealed Windows as fast as humanly possible, just to stem the tide of software cheating. The next couple years will be very interesting :)
I totally agree with you, and I hope the status quo will change. But I'm still skeptical after the Steam Deck success where many games enabled anti cheat, but some did roll back like I said previously.
Attestation could help, but I'm not sure if it goes in the spirit of what Valve tries to do with their OS. The system is open and you can easily access the desktop (it's a first party feature) and thus do what you want. Maybe with a separate verified boot state without desktop but the user experience would not be great.
And in the end, like you said, they'd run to only support sealed attested systems if they could. But cheats have evolved past being run on the computer running the game. Some use DMA or are in between the keyboard/mouse and the usb port. Consoles also have their fair share of cheaters. None of those would be solved by attestation.
Valve has shown recently that it's possible to fight cheaters without kernel AC or attestation. It's just a bit more difficult and intensive so other AC providers won't go the same route.
