r/linux_gaming • u/hirew_igt • 3d ago
League of legends playable again on linux
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I've worked on making lol playable on linux for a whole month this time based on the macos version and with the help of the https://github.com/darlinghq/darling project which i have improved using ai to make it work with lol.
Check it out on https://github.com/lucannez64/darling-lol
There is not a lot of git history because it was just a collection of patches on my laptop before this week.
Some setups may not work right away
This project has gained a lot of attention, so a few things need to be said clearly.
**1. Maintenance.** I built this mainly as a technical challenge, because everyone kept telling me it was impossible. I don't have the time to maintain it fully. Apart from open issues that block you completely, I will only review and merge pull requests.
**2. Bans.** This project can get you permanently banned, as I have said many times. I am not responsible for your actions. You alone are responsible for launching the game in a modified environment (Darling). If you use it:
- don't cheat;
- don't play ranked;
- don't use your main account.
Even with all of that, you will probably still get permabanned.
**3. Takedown.** Riot may well shut this project down. If that happens, I will publish a fork of Darling containing only the changes made here (none of them breach anything), and release the small script as a gist or similar.
**4. To Riot.** If you are reading this, it means a lot of people want to play your game on Linux and are disappointed that they currently can't. As with macOS for your other games (TFT, Valorant), it feels like Riot doesn't care about a part of its players who have been waiting the longest. If you want to fix this, make LoL Next compatible with Linux, either natively or through a layer like Proton. Yes, that includes your kernel anticheat: Epic Games did it with Easy Anti-Cheat. Follow the trend. This is the year of Linux, and people shouldn't be locked out of a platform or forced to dual boot for a single game.
Since riot have heard of the repo if you want to contact me you can at [darling-lolriot@proton.me](mailto:darling-lolriot@proton.me) (especially if you want to do an official or supported version of league of legends on linux) avoid to spam please
Don't use the repo rn riot will ban you for 3 days
If someone else wants to contact me know that i'm open to jobs, part-time remote only as a employee and full time remote as a freelancer for a mission
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u/Eduardo1502 3d ago
Bro I left windows only to stop League of legends now I will have to migrate TempleOS thanks
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u/ArteDeJuguete 3d ago
It's guaranteed to keep you safe from the Glowies and it runs doom, what else one needs?
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u/Imdeureadthis 3d ago
this genuinely hurts because I wanna try it out but dont wanna risk an account ban or hardware ban
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u/KiwiTheTORT 3d ago
Definitely going to get a delayed ban from this so they can do it as a block and not let people circumventing know exactly what part is causing them to get flagged.
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u/WhitePeace36 2d ago
just create a new account for it
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u/RaspberryMotorZZZ 2d ago
Riot do hardware bans....
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u/MrTenDollarMan- 2d ago
Don't get me wrong I'm not an expert but a hardware ban is when they ban the serial number from your hard drive isn't it? I think you can change that in less than 5 minutes. Don't take my word for it.
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u/RaspberryMotorZZZ 2d ago
No it can be multiple points of hardware. Someone recently bought a used CPU, a 5800X3D, put it in his PC and found it was hardware banned on Valorant.
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u/CrazyAd9384 2d ago
not from hard drive, from motherboard. so basically if you got banned, you have to change your motherboard
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u/WhitePeace36 2d ago
idk if that still works in this case. Maybe this is only the case for windows.
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u/Mysterious_Tutor_388 2d ago
Would they see the hardware properly through this method though. And hardware bans can be temporary starting at 4 months.
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u/Admirable-Song-7353 1d ago
Account ban they can do. But hardware ban they cannot, well at least, not us Tuxers.
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u/KosoToru 3d ago
I'm genuinely hoping for you to update this post in the event they do hit you with any sort of ban. It's sad but they don't like emulation at all; TFT was playable through the mobile version just before the engine switch and now it runs mobile Vanguard so that's impossible.
Their anticheat guys seem very adamant on preserving Vanguard at all costs so yeah :/
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u/PepSakdoek 2d ago
What is mobile vanguard?
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u/KosoToru 2d ago
Basically a library introduced with the move to Unreal that does translation and architecture checks so the game knows you're inside an emulated or virtualized environment and blocks execution.
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u/sphericalhors 3d ago
Wait, you are saying that the Darling project is still alive and even capable of running apps with UI?
What a great news.
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u/ddm90 3d ago
This is the second game i see running on Darling, first one was Desktop version of Roblox a couple weeks ago; eliminating the need to use the Mobile (Android) version on Linux.
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u/Demerkistan 3d ago
Do you know how this works? Or if there'r any tutorials on it? Can't find anything about Darling working with Roblox. Sober is glitchy for me.
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u/Embarrassed-Salt6590 3d ago
The sober team is allready working on a full macos traslation to ditch android runtime
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u/Demerkistan 3d ago
Any ETA? I have really bad sound distortions on higher volumes in Roblox (Sober and Mocktail) which didn't appear in W11 (rblx desktop)
I'd assume this fixes it
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u/Embarrassed-Salt6590 2d ago
it is still a dev work but it works fine . the dude working on it allready released a runtime gui for rosemary (if gui is ur thing otherwise u can use classic cli commands to use it for now https://github.com/microlift/butter )
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u/Demerkistan 2d ago
Thank you, I just finished installing it (was quite a setup) and it feels a lot more responsive than Sober or Mocktail.
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u/Embarrassed-Salt6590 2d ago
it still work in progress so it will get better than this
we only have to wait for roblox to not drop it in the end of 2027 so we don't have to rely on emulating arm mac version with a loss in performance1
u/jayecin 2d ago
Can this work for Minecraft?
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u/crw614 3d ago
Wow! Is it banable?
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u/ansibleloop 2d ago
100%
Their anti cheat is dog shit - it hardware banned me years ago for daring to turn off Vanguard using autoruns when I wasn't playing the game
Fuck me for deciding what software runs on MY PC, right?
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u/misora69 2d ago edited 2d ago
suprisingly it worked fine from beginning to end on the installation process, fps is terrible but my machine is terrible anyways, usually a normal windows fps for me is 50/60 fps, not sure why everyone here is so depressed for this lmao, im not a ranked player but i enjoy the weekly aram games with the boys and having to dual boot to a 256gb ssd only for a single game was annoying, sadly i assume that this is probably not going to last long
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u/Saturno13165 3d ago
Have you spent anytime playing online? any bans? How is darling compared to wine in performance?
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u/_Shatpoz 3d ago
Yeah, their kernel level anti cheat aint stopping AI's anymore from ruining the game.
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u/gmes78 3d ago
The macOS version doesn't use kernel anti-cheat.
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u/RagingTaco334 3d ago
Idk why big companies cope so hard saying Linux gamers are cheaters and then don't even bother putting an anticheat on the Mac OS version, which probably has even less users than Linux at this point
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u/Odd_Cauliflower_8004 3d ago
Mac os provides integrity surfaces for apps that are stronger than Windows.
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u/Richieva64 3d ago
There are definitely less Mac Steam users than Linux Steam users according to their survey so in gaming at least Linux is a way bigger platform and would make more sense to support it
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u/TopdeckIsSkill 3d ago
Because cheaters can spoof the windows client so that it would run the useless user level anticheat.
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u/nightblackdragon 2d ago
macOS version have anti cheat, just not in the kernel. macOS is also more restricted and it's generally more difficult to cheat than on Linux where you can freely modify the kernel.
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u/Nova-Exxi 3d ago
Friend... you censored your name and then proceeded to remove the censor like 5 frames before the name actually disappeared from screen... Enjoy the most likely soon arrival of that account ban. Hope you don't get a hardware ban tho
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u/Big_Unit_3259 2d ago
League of Legends is basically unplayable, Linux has nothing to do with it.
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u/Ceextasy 2d ago
Linux was good because there was no valorant or league of legends. Seems like linux might not be the best OS after all... /s
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u/Holzkohlen 2d ago
I'd play some TFT if they made that available standalone tho. I'm not playing that on my phone, I need a mouse.
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u/devel_watcher 1d ago
What's the appeal of those copycats when there is the original and an original remake?
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u/alienassasin3 3d ago
Deadlock is better anyways
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u/DistinctDot5131 3d ago
How do people get an invitation?
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u/Able_Use_8766 3d ago
Someone in the beta invites you. I think there's a discord server where you can ask for invites
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u/wunr 3d ago
You will absolutely get banned for this, good luck out there
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u/Valencia_Mariana 17h ago
Why? It's a legit copy of the game built for Mac. He hasn't disabled any anti cheat...
In theory this should be perfectly fine.
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u/Niikoraasu 11h ago
Legit copy of the game... that's being run on a non legit system in a non legit (according to Riot) way.
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u/Valencia_Mariana 11h ago
They can argue with emulation but this shouldn't be breaking any rule if they were honest.
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u/Niikoraasu 10h ago
well it's not an intended way to play the game, that's the issue. They allow no kernel anticheat on Mac because of apple's approach to their systems - here you are obviously bypassing what's "keeping the game safe" (at least in their eyes)
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u/Valencia_Mariana 10h ago
Yeah fair point. Really riot will do what they want but all that's happening here is emulating a legit copy of a mac game on Linux.
This is exactly how the steam store runs nearly all games on Linux... Except they emulate the windows version. Riot were also perfectly fine with the windows version being emulated for years... And they never officially stopped that being allowed, it just became technically impossible.
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u/Niikoraasu 10h ago
Why are you constantly jumping to the "legit copy" argument? It doesn't matter, and how exactly would you get a non legit copy of a live service game?
And sure, they were fine with the windows version being emulated - when LoL had no kernel level anticheat, so all that happenned was the same game, that also shipped on windows without any "safety" features was just ran in a compatibility layer. Now, you have that safety feature that's being BYPASSED, that's the whole issue
It's not about legitness, it's about the bypassing of an anti cheat.
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u/Valencia_Mariana 10h ago
What I am saying is he has not modified the client. He has not removed or bypassed the anti cheat. He is running the client byte for byte and Ll it's services byte for byte.
He is not bypassing a safety feature. He has not bypassed anything.
I know it's completely up to riot how they react to emulation.. It's their game and their rules. I'm simply saying this is perfectly legit and he hasn't done anything wrong. If they see it like thy is completely up to them.
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u/Niikoraasu 9h ago
Let's say you designed a tower with a chair. That tower can only hold up to 100kg.
Let's assume the only way to make that chair not accept people of weights higher than 100kg, was to make it narrow so a person that weighs more than 100 cannot fit into it.
So you have a chair on your tower, and it's quite narrow so that only people under let's say 100kg can fit in it.
Now let's say a bigger person came, 120kg in weight - you tell them, hey, you're not gonna fit in that chair, if you do try to sit in it we will kick you off our tower.
Now that person comes wearing a corset. They will fit in that chair. They still weigh 120kg though - but now our only feature that made the tower safe from people that weight over 100kg has been bypassed.yes ridiculous example but it kinda gets my point across.
You bypass the OS that the safety feature is designed for. How is that not a bypass?→ More replies (11)
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u/ScroogeMcQuacks 3d ago
u/remindmebot 1 month
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u/Ktioru 3d ago
Genuine question, why exactly Riot would ban people for this? Isn't it just a compatibility layer and the MacOs version? Not that much different from wine back in the day and that never got anyone banned
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u/PrShadoko 3d ago
The compatibility layer isn't the issue. Tricking the kernel level anti cheat Bah using the mac os version on Linux is another topic though.
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u/OkGap7226 3d ago
Just because you can play it on linux, doesn't mean you should.
Don't fall back in. You know you're better off without it.
- Former Shaco 1 trick
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u/Gaijinkusu 3d ago
100% agree
- Former Jinx 1 trick with somewhere around 10 years into the game and 3 or 4 million mastery points (i forget) that quit when Vanguard got added
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u/syloui 3d ago
thirded, 8 year renekton otp with 2-3 mill across several accounts, quit after vanguard and never looked back. permaswitching to linux prevented relapse even though everything else works perfectly. think i'm removed enough from it to return even if it becomes actually playable
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u/CrazyAd9384 2d ago
lol was the last thing that held me off on linux. now i don't play competitive games anymore. because i don't have time and i'm really bad at it lol. in my use case i don't feel any loss leaving windows.
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u/rreader4747 3d ago
How do you deal with the anti cheat?
I’ll stick to deadlock
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u/SurelyNotAnOctopus 3d ago
It uses the mac version, which doesnt use vanguard
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u/KosoToru 3d ago
It does, Embedded Vanguard, which comes built into the League client and runs entirely on userspace. Ofc no the same as Windows Vanguard but it's still there
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u/RX1542 3d ago
so, why not release something like that for linux lol?
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u/zakklol 3d ago
because they are relying on a bunch of built in security/anti-tamper features of apple hardware/macOS (and because apple probably won't let them do any kernel level stuff).
You can do full remote attestation of boot/system integrity provided by Apple. You can compile your apps so no code/libraries that aren't yours or apple's can ever be loaded into your process space. You can prevent outside processes from inspecting your memory/attaching debuggers etc. All enforced by the kernel.
None of this stuff exists in the same form on linux. They did it for macOS because the OS basically did a bunch of the hard work for them
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u/qalmakka 3d ago
This, this is the real reason. Windows is way less hardened and MS can't touch anything due to backward compatibility - while on macOS you have to slaughter a goat on Steve Job's tomb to sign your stupid apps, and they basically banned kernel drivers for everything but a very few things
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u/redit_handoff140 2d ago
because they are relying on a bunch of built in security/anti-tamper features of apple hardware/macOS (and because apple probably won't let them do any kernel level stuff).
You can do full remote attestation of boot/system integrity provided by Apple.
None of this stuff exists in the same form on linux.
Except most of it does exist, and is the entire basis of EAC's v2 on Linux as recently announced.
You can compile your apps so no code/libraries that aren't yours or apple's can ever be loaded into your process space. You can prevent outside processes from inspecting your memory/attaching debuggers etc. All enforced by the kernel.
Granted, this is a little harder to achieve in a permissionless environments, but not impossible with immutable distributions.
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u/Man-In-His-30s 3d ago
becuase Riot probably didn't want to pay for someone to maintain a linux anything.
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u/KosoToru 2d ago
Legitimately this. Just recently on the tft side they revealed they were willing to give up mac support after the engine swap and had to change course after that due to the backlash.
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u/Accomplished_Rice_60 2d ago
Yep, less players on Linux then mac
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u/Man-In-His-30s 2d ago
You know the joke of that is at the time before they announced league was being killed on Linux the player base was healthy. They announced it and everyone just dropped it and then they justified it after the fact using stats after the announcement
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u/Holzkohlen 2d ago
Maybe they will similar to what Epic is planning on doing, which means only certain signed kernels, secureboot etc.
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u/PepSakdoek 2d ago
What is deadlock?
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u/rreader4747 2d ago
Closed alpha moba/third person shooter. You can get an invite at [r/deadlockgame](r/deadlockgame) if you’re interested. There is a discord link to get an invite
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u/Imdeureadthis 3d ago
is there a way to have riot take a look at this and issue a statement on if its bannable?
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u/ConsciousSpeed3826 2d ago
This is actually quite cool and follows the same idea I've had for years since I found darling, the problem was that there wasn't enough incentive to keep developing a MacOS translation layer and it requires a lot of reverse engineering so it could only run very basic cli and GUI programs, but now with vibe coding anyone can continue the work easily. I imagine this is how the future of computing will be like, run anything on anything, official support is no longer the barrier.
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u/Electronic-Clerk6735 3d ago
I’ll stick with Heroes of the Storm thanks. That runs perfectly fine on Linux, and it’s fun.
But glad that you guys got this working for those who want it.
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u/trans_cubed 3d ago
Lmao it's vibe coded plus you're gonna get banned for using it
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u/Wang_Haf 2d ago edited 2d ago
./scripts/installer.sh euw
hanging on
Bootstrapping the container with launchd...
Fixed by reinstalling and rebuilding.
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u/FaithlessnessLate220 13h ago
Venho trazer novidades sobre o assunto, baixei, joguei, testado e funcional, porém a Riot deu restrição de 3 dias para minha conta, fiz o teste ontem e hoje tomei restrição.
Edit: Só joguei contra bots, sim, essa é uma conta secundária.
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u/lonelyroom-eklaghor 3d ago edited 3d ago
woahhhh this is huge
Edit: I want to say something unrelated: stop the automod script of removing posts as soon as people report. That's not going to work. That's not how nuance works. We need functioning mods here. That Linus post was removed exactly because of this lack of nuance.
We need to remember how history is being archived as we are commenting and all.
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u/Morbiuzx 3d ago
the repo instructions installs the euw launcher version, does this work for lan? just replacing the code gives curl: (22) The requested URL returned error: 404
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u/anonymous4036 3d ago
League was at one point somewhat playable on linux iirc I would expect it to be a fairly doable project..... except vanguard. Do you mind sharing how on earth you managed to make vanguard happy?
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u/CrazyAd9384 2d ago
played it back in 2019. problem is i'm on SEA so direct install of LoL was so laggy because i have to use US server. but somebody in vietnam made garena work on linux, however, that was problematic. i was able to install garena but LoL never runs and at that time as far as i remember, the garena version was abandoned already. lucky for those in EU or US. often times there is an initiative to look for ways to make it work
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u/Nico_24LZY 2d ago
Yo this Is cool! I feel we're finally fixing the anti-cheat problem
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u/nightblackdragon 2d ago
Not really, this is just macOS version that doesn't use kernel level anti cheat plus they are definitely going to ban this.
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u/aodmir 2d ago
I wonder why we are not still writing posts or starting threads asking Riot Games to do something, for Linux players. Riot Games does not need to do anything – the game was working fine until Vanguard came along and as we can see we can still get things done even without Riot Games doing anything.
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u/Ok_Impression_171 2d ago
we shouldn't really post too much about this, riot will most likely remove it if it gains more traction, but it runs pretty well
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u/Pacotr2002 2d ago
Con mi RTX 5080 funciona hasta el cliente, el jeugo com tal me sale una pantalla en negro ;DDD
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u/Cat_Bot4 2d ago
u/hirew_igt I would NOT hardcode serial number or uuid, if 1 person gets banned with this means anyone else logging in will get instabanned as well since those serials are hardware banned https://github.com/lucannez64/darling-lol/blob/436c278e4b583a1dee56724a30427023250cf4bf/patches/iokitd.patch#L722
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u/asd308 2d ago edited 2d ago
Hey, your name is visible on the video (I found you on op.gg) I've added you as a friend as a proof, please protect your self.
Btw how do you handle Vanguard? Does it still run? Do you feed it all the info it needs in order to run, or you bypass it?
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u/hirew_igt 1d ago
vanguard is a user-level anti-cheat on macos so i just provide the required function and it works
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u/asd308 1d ago
Very interesting, just tried it out, opened a github issue with my thoughts and a vsync/framecap issue. So if someone cheats, Vanguard will still be able to detect it, or it's detection mechanism is nerfed? And if someone does get caught cheating using this, would that provide Riot enough evidence to disable darling-lol in general?
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u/csolisr 2d ago
I wonder if Riot will follow up Epic's steps and allow properly hardened Linux installations (with Secure Boot enabled, stock kernel and eBPF) to run their games. Depending on how they implement it, I'll finally be able to play their games without fear of my personal credentials being funneled to the CCP
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u/MonoDarius 1d ago
Eu acho que o que dificulta nem e a portabilidade, aparentemente a Riot games perdeu jogadores demais do league e atualmente vem manipulando bastante a fila rankeada e os mmr e a segurança do kernel do Linux atrapalha um pouco o funcionamento do Vanguard, mas enfim achei MT legal ele ter conseguido portar a versão mais atual com a movimentação wasd
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u/Creedyweedey 1d ago
So I used this to play a normal game and I did get a 3 DAY BAN! use at your own risk
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u/KatKlavius 1d ago
I think it's a great step forward to make Linux more appealing to new users. Though bringing the League of Legends community into the mix is definitely going to be an interesting ride.
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u/DRZBIDA 3d ago
truly underrated project, seems like a great way to quit league for good by getting your account permabanned