EA and developer Respawn have announced that Apex Legends can no longer be played on Linux operating systems, potentially leaving Steam Deck players out in the cold without a workaround.
In an update posted on X (formerly Twitter), Respawn puts the decision down to a desire to maintain "competitive integrity" in Apex Legends. The developer says Linux is a "path for a variety of impactful exploits and cheats".
Respawn admits that the Apex Legends Linux population is "small", but the "impact" of those players "infected a fair amount of players' games".
Addressing the issue in a more nuanced way would have required an "outsized level of focus and attention" given the Linux platform's size, so the decision was made to ban Linux outright instead. This decision takes effect "immediately", too, so you won't be able to play Apex on Linux anymore.
If, however, you decide to install Windows on your Steam Deck, you can still play Apex Legends that way. If you prefer to play Apex Legends directly from your Steam Deck's OS, however, you're out of luck, unfortunately.
This also won't affect Apex Legends players who are playing on Steam via Windows platforms, nor, of course, those who are playing on console or anywhere else (unless that "anywhere else" happens to be a PC running Linux, of course).
Apex Legends has run into problems with cheaters in the past.
Back in March, a bizarre hacking incident saw professional Apex players being hit with a hack that injected various unfair advantages into their games, including wallhacks and aimbots. That's not the only time the game has run afoul of cheating and hacking, either.
This announcement also comes shortly after Valve announced that developers who want their games to be on Steam must declare whether their titles have kernel-level anti-cheat mechanisms in place. Apex Legends is one such game; it uses the popular Easy Anti-Cheat software.
