this post was submitted on 25 Jul 2024
786 points (99.0% liked)

Linux Gaming

15910 readers
4 users here now

Gaming on the GNU/Linux operating system.

Recommended news sources:

Related chat:

Related Communities:

Please be nice to other members. Anyone not being nice will be banned. Keep it fun, respectful and just be awesome to each other.

founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 34 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (5 children)

Antivirus doubly doesn’t make much sense on handheld. Today’s malware is more stealthy and focused on stealing your data, but what sensitive data are you storing on a gaming-specific handheld?

I guess there’s your Steam account, but the risk profile just isn’t the same, and it comes at the cost of performance which is already much more limited in this form factor.

[–] [email protected] 63 points 4 months ago

I'd argue that power is more the issue. All that processor time the antivirus spends scanning and rescanning is a chunk of battery gone.

[–] ricecake 27 points 4 months ago

From a theft perspective, being able to hijack someones steam account is likely to be more lucrative than most. There's a window where they might be able to resell the account to someone who doesn't know how easily valve can verify true ownership and fix it.

You've still got a lot of botnets and cryptocurrency miners flying around. Ransomware is the big one that targets people with important data that a gaming device is immune to.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

Anything with an IP address can be vulnerable to malware running miners, botnets, and all that good stuff for bad people to continually use your toys to do in the background. The convenient jumping off point into your home network and other inward-facing stuff there you might not want accessible from outside is also worth considering.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

There's still ransomware. Pay X bitcoin or say adyeu to your encrypted savegames.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

Wipe and my cloud saves got me. We good. Its a handheld, not my desktop.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

That's not how most malware works though. It's pretty rare that it's targeted rather than something just looking to take advantage of whatever security hole is present.

Like, I highly doubt anyone is making Steam OS specific malware, but if there's some security hole in the kernel, a piece of malware targeting that isn't going to check if it's a handheld gaming device and stop.