What’s best practice to safely play pirated games on Linux? Looking to mitigate potentially malicious executables from wrecking havoc on my system.
It is mostly a myth (and scare tactic invented by copyright trolls and encouraged by overzealous virus scanners) that pirated games are always riddled with viruses. They certainly can be, if you download them from untrustworthy sources, but if you’re familiar with the actual piracy scene, you have to understand that trust is and always will be a huge part of it, ways to build trust are built into the community, that’s why trust and reputation are valued higher than even the software itself. Those names embedded into the torrent names, the people and the release groups they come from, the sources where they’re distributed, have meaning to the community, and this is why. Nobody’s going to blow 20 years of reputation to try to sneak a virus into their keygen. All the virus scans that say “Virus detected! ALARM! ALARM!” on every keygen you download? If you look at the actual detection information about what it actually detected, and you dig deep enough through their obfuscated scary-severity-risks-wall-of-text, you’ll find that in almost all cases, it’s actually just a generic, non-specific detection of “tools associated with piracy or hacking” or something along those lines. They all have their own ways of spinning it, but in every case it’s literally detecting the fact that it’s a keygen, and saying “that’s scary! you won’t want pirated illegal software on your computer right?! Don’t worry, I, your noble antivirus program will helpfully delete it for you!”
It’s not as scary as you think, they just want you to think it is, because it helps drive people back to paying for their software. It’s classic FUD tactics and they’re all part of it. Antivirus companies are part of the same racket, they want you paying for their software too.
Downloaded a game which Windows Defender flagged as high-threat for containing “Cracked game content” the other day. Why yes, my cracked copy of this game IS cracked, thank you for noticing.
Unless you inspect every line of code and/or monitor your computer activity to a super human level then you’ll never know.
Viruses don’t behave like a neanderthal like they used to 20 years ago, so just because you don’t notice a virus doesn’t mean you don’t have one. Let’s be honest, viruses are still a thing and botnets have become a thing. These don’t magically appear from nothing.
You shouldn’t be blindly trusting anyone on the internet, especially those not abiding by the laws. People and entities can be impersonated. They can behave differently at any moment.
Personally i would do one of three things, run pirated content, in a VM, on a separate drive, or on a dedicated computer - because why take the risk when you don’t have to.
I trust the pirates more than the corporations.
Remember the Sony BMG copy protection rootkit scandal?
I think corporations are doing quite well if your example is from 19 years ago.
In the same era, we had things like LimeWire where files were frequently viruses, CP, or similar masquerading as innocent files like the latest song from your favorite artist.
I’ve never tried closed trackers, so I can’t speak on that side of pirate life but I think it’s naive to trust pirates on public trackers.
It’s kinda trivial to limit their ability to do anything in Linux though. It’s not as if virus authors are gonna waste their time trying to exploit a demographic that is both small and extremely fragmentary when they can just write for windows.
Never mind the fact that almost all are Windows games. If there is any malware in there it’s directed at Windows.In all honesty, I find this to be a very silly concern.
All those companies are stealing from their users. If I steal from a thief, is it really theft?
It was meant to be a joke… viruses are MEANT to be downloaded by their creators, but nobody would actually want to do that
Maybe times have changed but when I was in the warez scene 25+ years ago and essentially pirated every game I played, I saved all those games and the keygen.exe files and when they get scanned by modern AV they all come back infected. If anything it’s different because viruses are pointless now with the internet and there are much broader malware injection points nowadays than the minimal game pirating scene. But yeah I don’t know what I’m talking about, just my historical POV.
To be fair, nowadays malware behavior is more likely to come from the companies than the cracks.
Get scene releases from trusted sources (not public trackers) and ensure that the hash matches what is in the nfo on predb.
I disagree with the “not public trackers” part. Private trackers are better in a lot of ways but not everyone wants to bother with them. Stick to reputable release groups on public trackers and you’ll be fine.
I’ve only ever downloaded from public trackers (cause it’s impossible to maintain the required seed ratio on private trackers and Debrid services are better anyway); never had an issue ever over 20-some years of torrenting ever. I don’t bother verifying checksums cause it’s unnecessary paranoia. All the major public trackers have good moderation teams; the malicious garbage gets called out in the comments and removed rather quickly.
All the private trackers I use have bonus systems so you can still build ratio. It’s usually a slow start on a new tracker but once you get established it’s very easy to keep a 1:1 or better ratio. I don’t bother with debrid services because paying for piracy is where I draw the line.
As for checking hashes, I don’t do it on any of the private trackers I use but OP seems overly paranoid so I figured it was solid advice for them. I always checked when I still used public trackers. Only twice did I ever find a mismatch, one was actually malicious and the other was just a random crc error.
But again, why bother paying for a private tracker, when I can just pay for Real-Debrid instead and not worry about silly ratios, since every torrent is a direct download straight from their servers.
I’m considering getting back into pc gaming, it’s honestly been a couple decades so I’m ludicrously out of touch. On top of that I don’t know shit about wine, in my 10-15 years of running linux I think I’ve only run wine one time, right after making the switch. I quickly decided using native apps was easier and I’ve never really needed any software badly enough.
Anyway, my assumption is that linux piracy is so scarce that I’d be better off just looking to run windows cracks through wine, is that accurate? Are there any decent private trackers for games with a reasonably low entry barrier (an interview process for example)?
Safest possible way? Separate machine on a different network, like guest Wi-Fi.
Realistically? I use containers blocking Internet and most file access and only use sources I trust not Internet rando releases.
Right, to elaborate run a packet capture and monitor the IPs your system connects to when installing and playing the game.
Never use a web browser with email or any other access to online accounts, clear all cookies after each browsing session.
I’d argue have a separate boot drive with absolutely nothing stored, nothing critical, no cookies, it’s single use of getting the games and hell, probably even run a VPN while playing the games so no tracing back to ISP public IP.
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.
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
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.
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.
