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.
Somebody should create a piracy bible, and make this message part of it
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.
It’s funny that would be a thing when it’s been found that even the companies, themselves, like Nintendo, have been caught using pirated versions of their own games for redistribution.
Wonder if those games would get detected for the same reason.
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?
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.
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.
That’s fair. As long as the hash matches what is in the predb nfo, you should be good to go. I have encountered legit looking releases on public sites with edited nfo files though so definitely double check against a reliable source ce for that.
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
chrootbefore running Wine (soZ:doesn’t point at the real system root), orsuinto 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.
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.
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.
Virtual machines. Disable drag-and-drop and shared folders/clipboard. It’s still not impossible to escape the vm but it’s very difficult and most malware isnt capable of doing that.
Don’t use VirtualBox. It’s great for most things but it’s not powerful enough for games. Use VMware Player or Workstation and use the max amount of vram it’ll let you.
Why not use KVM? It’s FOSS, and it’s pretty simple to use, at least in my opinion. All I know is that I wouldn’t want any company spying on me if I was doing something illegal.
I can’t speak for VMware’s technology, but the company just got bought by Broadcom, so treat them with Red Hat-like suspicion.
oh yeah no the company is sketchy af. The product is better for this specific use case though so that’s why i’m recommending it
I had one that intentionally detected a VM and just gave a message that said “Hello :)” and wouldn’t load.
Bottles maybe? It’s a flatpak so it’s containerized.
You shouldn’t worry that much anyway, if a pirated game has a virus it’s most likely designed for Windows.
Wine might translate the windows calls to Linux depending on what the malware does
Run them in Bottle, then disable internet access for the games.
If you are on Linux you could simply run a firejailed wine on the executable and not worry about much, if the firejailling stops something from working then the executable is kinda fishy since firajailed games should work (I tried it and it works)
if you are 100% sure it’s safe, get the Linux download if it has one.
To be fair, nowadays malware behavior is more likely to come from the companies than the cracks.
If I don’t hear that sweet 8 bit techno house blaring out of the PC speaker, then I start to worry
I use Lutris
It would be nice if Lutris had a “no internet” option, but i did not see such an option
Removed by mod
I dual boot second Windows installation for that
If you’re really paranoid, you could run the game inside bubblewrap, inside a container.
Not an expert, but I assume Bottles would be a good idea. It allows you to create separate wine prefixes for each app so if any app is malicious, it shouldn’t affect any other one.
