Alistair McFarlane, Chief Operating Officer of Facepunch Studios, has confirmed that Rust will not be released for Linux and will not be compatible with Valve’s Proton.
We don’t intend to support Proton or Linux. Those platforms have an outsized number of cheaters, and both our anti-cheat and EAC are hard to maintain for such a small player base. After we dropped Linux support, cheaters ended up outnumbering legitimate players.
He explained that adding Proton or Linux support would complicate anti-cheat measures unless the studio had a dedicated anti-cheat team. For similar reasons, Apex Legends discontinued Proton support in October 2024.
McFarlane also pointed out that Linux users represent under 0.01% of the player base, so expanding to that platform would offer negligible benefit.
The decision underscores the anti-cheat challenges Valve faces on SteamOS and could reduce the appeal of Steam Machines compared with Windows-based alternatives.
Source: iXBT.games