So, Benefits: Being able to play their games. Drawbacks : a lot, and it seems like they are not getting talked about a ton.
Here is the deal: Riot doesn’t trust you that you will interact with their entertainment software in a fair way witb other users of the same software. So they demand that you install a kernel level anti Cheat which gives them full control of your system. And then they demand that you trust them not to abuse that power. Because if you try to figure out if you can trust them… They will ban you. It’s the equivalent of having someone demand of you to take NSFW Pictures whenever, wherever, however much they like and telling you that they won’t share those.
Yes they can decrypt everything from your encrypted drive if they wanted to, so not even an encrypted file system that windows can’t even read natively will save you. Remember that they can read and write any file they want to so they can get to your decryption key, figure out your file system and get windows to read if they wanted to. It’s the same with kernel level cheat developers that likely charge money for their cheats. Heck if they wanted, they could use your machine to mine crypto if they wanted to. Or ransom it with encryption of their own. Or get you in legal trouble in so many other ways like putting incriminating files on your machine.
In short they don’t trust you and want full acces while demanding that you trust them with no way of knowing if you can. Which means you can’t have privacy with a kernel lever anti Cheat or rather rootkit because that is what it actually is.
Also consider who owns riot games. And think about how protected or in that case rather how not protected your data is.
And then ask if you want to give a third party that level of control over a machine you own and paid for.
I suppose it doesn’t quite qualify as breaking the system in a funny or stupid way but it certainly was one of those stupid things that was easy to fix after a ton of trouble shooting, ignoring the issue for a while and trying to fix it again.
So i had an old pc where I had a failed hard drive which I replaced. Obviously I also accidentally unplugged my optical disc drive and plugged it back in. Now that failed drive was just a data drive so the system should have booted up no problem since the os was on a SSD but instead it got a kernel panic and got stuck at boot. Since it was late I left it at that and came back to that the next day where it would still not boot. So I unplugged the disc drive and looked up what it could be. Tried a ton of different possible solutions but every time I added that disc drive it would panic.
I eventually kind of gave up and just didn’t use that disc drive at all and just had it as a paperweight in the system. Unplugged and all that. When my replacement SSDs for my old data drive and backup drive came in I tried again to get that optical drive working but to no avail. So I unplugged it again, got it all set up and ran into another issue where for some reason Linux couldn’t properly use my backup SSD. So I investigated that as well and trough some miracle found a post on the forum from my Mainboard manufacturer… Turns out that particular Mainboard had a data retention chip on it that didn’t like Linux.
So naturally I just plugged everything into the data ports that were not controlled by that chip and it all worked as intended.
Stupid dumb chip on a Mainboard, all I had to do was try the simple idea of unplugging and trying a different connector but instead I did all that other stuff first that didn’t work and cost me so much of my time.
Moral of the story, when in doubt try and put stuff on different connectors and see if that fixes it. Might just be a dead connector for all you know. Or an incompatible chip on the Mainboard.
FWIW I bought that Mainboard long before I switched to Linux and didn’t plan at all to switch at the time. But that’s a different story.