

While I agree with you (and upvoted to match), I also acknowledge that not every game is suited for that kind of server structure. Competitive ranked games, that rely on a fair matchmaking algorithm and consistent server performance, simply can’t just route matchmaking players to a random community-hosted server. And communities can’t really form that way, either.
Or to make it short, esports can’t do this while maintaining their esport status. And those are the games that need anti-cheat the most.
Me personally? I don’t even like those kinds of games. I barely play multiplayer games at all, and when I do it’s because I’m playing with friends, and couldn’t care less about my rank (if I even get one). So for my kinds of games/scenarios, community or self-hosted servers are the obvious choice with zero drawbacks. But I can still acknowledge that it’s not a solution for all cases.
Lo and behold, most multiplayer games do run on Linux!









Uhh, no… It’s because that’s not how anything works. There’s so many flaws in your argument, but here’s just one: if an enemy player is really well camouflaged but technically visible, then they would be rendered on the client side, but a human player would have to be very observant to spot them and kill them.
A cheater can replace the enemy character’s texture so that, on their screen, the enemy’s camouflage is useless and the player can spot them with no effort.
From everything the server can see, the cheater’s gameplay is legit. They could just be really good at spotting enemy camouflage. Only by looking at the client side render output, you can spot the cheat.
Unless the server is actually rendering the game for each player (which, spoiler alert, isn’t the case), most cheats are not detectable nor preventable on the server side.