I am looking for help on how to run closed source / pirated games on linux within a virtual machine. I would like to start by saying if I could walk into a shop and buy with cash, a game on a CD like in the old days I would. I have recently become very privacy conscious and until I figure out a way to anonymously and privately purchase things like this I am going to stick with pirating. Also, it is helping me to archive content as everything seems to be moving online and I want to stick with offline applications / media etc in my control.
Now, I am familiar with virtualbox but of course, it is no good for gaming. I have read about other applications that offer much better performance with support for GPU passthrough or similar (but how does this affect the security side of things when running pirated games). Forgive me, this is all quite new to me.
What I want is a virtual machine capable of gaming so that I can more safely run pirated games on linux. Also, I am very new to linux and some help in how I should actually go about running games on linux in the first place. I do not want to just install steam because it has closed source elements and being more privacy conscious now, I’m not sure I want to. Though I am aware I can use the proton layer to enable gaming support which I believe is fully open source. For my purposes lutris sounds like it may be the route to go. Thoughts on this welcome.
As a side note, I am thinking of signing up to GOG as they, to me, seem like a better alternative to steam where I can actually own a DRM free copy of a game that I buy. On a pirating note I thought locating signed, hash checked GOG installers to be a good option for security for dipping my toe into pirating games on linux. I am much, much more comfortable with detecting and removing malware in a windows ecosystem. Linux, completely foreign. So I am trying to be careful.
Once I get fully set up I plan to buy the games I enjoy on GOG, I think that will be the path I can be most comfortable with. At the end of the day I will own a DRM free copy of the game itself. That is the best I can do where I cannot get it on physical media I think. I already do this for CD’s and DVD’s etc.
Any help would be appreciated, thank you.
KVM Passthrough, e.g. with https://looking-glass.io/
However, it's way too much hassle. Just run Steam in a sandbox, e.g. Firejail.
Is there anything for linux with the ease of gui setup that comes with virtualbox, that supports gpu passthrough. Wherever I look there is a need to dive into the terminal and use multiple applications to get things running.
Thanks.
This is the best guide you can find.
Thank you, I shall check that out.
You can use Gnome Boxes or virt-manager, but in the end you'll still be fiddling with config files, as GPU pass-through is not really easy to do, or recommended in this case.
It's only worth the hassle if you need Windows to play some games, and even then will Kernel-level anticheat still ban you in online games.
It's much less hassle to use Firejail (or similar). That one just needs a few lines of config and already has predefined configs for Steam etc., however you might need to tweak them a bit if you store games and savegames somewhere else than your homedir.
Thanks for the reply. I have been progressing down the virt-manager route as it seems to come up a lot when talking about pass-through. Firejail is definetly on my list to research. Thank you.