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Safest way to run pirated games? (lemmy.getmeotter.work)

submitted 9 months ago by biscoot@lemmy.getmeotter.work to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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What's best practice to safely play pirated games on Linux? Looking to mitigate potentially malicious executables from wrecking havoc on my system.

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[-] rtxn@lemmy.world 26 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

The official flatpak release of Bottles offers sandboxing. It comes from Flatpak itself, so other similar apps (like Heroic) might support it too.

Another option is to chroot before running Wine (so Z: doesn't point at the real system root), or su into another user (Wine inherits the user's privileges). It's also possible to run Wine inside a container, but GUI support is questionable.

Ultimately, running an untrusted executable is always a risk, regardless of the OS. If you want near-absolute safety, you'll want a different machine - either a VM or a heavily firewalled physical machine.

[-] Kaldo@kbin.social 1 points 9 months ago

Got any good guides for bottles? I've tried it recently and then got stuck on literally step one: installing the gog launcher just throw errors, I tried the 2nd gog installer and that one just leads to a black screen when I run it. I'm not sure what to tinker with, whether I try a different bottle or where to even start

[-] rtxn@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I don't personally use bottles, it hates running inside Hyprland.

If you want games straight from GOG, try the Heroic launcher on Flathub. It has direct GOG integration and Flatpak's permission system. You can then use Flatseal (also from Flathub) to adjust its security - particularly if you want to install games outside $HOME, which needs an extra permission.

You can also download the offline installer from GOG and just run Wine from the terminal.

[-] Kaldo@kbin.social 2 points 9 months ago

That's what I tried first but also had a lot of confusing experiences with its file hierarchy, prefixes, lutris/wine/proton and all of these. I was hoping bottles lives up to its promise of "one click installation with community install scripts" instead. This is my first real attempt at linux, I didn't even know what flatpak is until a week ago, I used the appimage for heroic which was also very confusing for a time. Starting to think I might be just too dumb/inpatient for it tbh, it's just one issue after another - even simple stuff like games ran from steam with proton have lots of issues that aren't reported on protondb.

[-] rtxn@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

I didn't realize you were new, it sounded like an issue anyone could have. Gaming on Linux is definitely not a perfect experience. Please don't be afraid to ask around in the various linux_gaming communities, there are always people who are willing to help.

What's your computer like? What brand and model is your GPU? What distribution? If the GPU is Nvidia, do you know if you have the open-source Nouveau or the proprietary Nvidia driver?

A bit of a glossary:

Wine: a compatibility layer that allows Windows executables to run on Linux systems by translating Windows system calls to Linux calls.
Proton: a derivative of Wine maintained by Valve, optimized for gaming on Steam.
Wineprefix or prefix: a mock-up of a Windows filesystem. The application running inside Wine sees this as the C: drive. The default wineprefix is located in ~/.wine. The system's root directory is mounted as the Z: drive.
Lutris, Bottles, Heroic: graphical front-ends to manage many aspects of your Wine applications.

[-] Kaldo@kbin.social 1 points 9 months ago

It's a Dell laptop with an Nvidia GPU. I tried Linux Mint but I'm having constant OS-breaking freezes after gaming for a while and it's happening on 2 different games so far (completely unresponsive, and it's with steam games so no custom tinkering in lutris/wine). Thinking I'll just try a fresh install but with PopOS when I have time.

Thanks for the summary, it all does make a bit more sense to me now but first time I had to spend half an hour just to find BG3 saves in Heroic due to the seemingly duplicates of folder structures all over the place lol

[-] rtxn@lemmy.world 1 points 9 months ago

Nvidia is unfortunately kind of a dick about Linux support. The open-source Nouveau driver is making great strides, but I don't think it'll be ready for general adoption for several years. The proprietary driver (the nvidia-dkms package) is far more usable, but there are always some issues.

If you want to focus on gaming, you should consider Nobara or Garuda Linux.

Garuda is based on Arch, and its main selling point is that whatever you need for gaming (Wine, Steam, DXVK, VKD3D) is either installed out of the box, or installed and configured in one click. Since Arch, and by extension, Garuda, is a rolling release, it gets very frequent updates that are always cutting edge, but it might require some maintenance at times.

Nobara is maintained by Glorious Eggroll, who also maintains custom Wine and Proton releases and has made massive contributions to Linux gaming. It's based on Fedora, which is a point-release distribution - it receives security updates continuously, and feature updates every few years, so it should require little maintenance.