Hi, I was originally going to post this in a piracy community, but I think it fits better here. I didn’t see anything in the rules about piracy, but I apologize if it (talking about it rather) isn’t allowed here. Anyway, I mostly use foss for better privacy, but I want to be able to fire up the occasional game. I haven’t played any proprietary games for a while, but would like to. I want to know how piracy impacts privacy. I imagine not having to phone home every 2min for drm would allow me to run offline, but I may want to play with friends or something, and was wondering generally what you all recommend for gaming.
Obligatory info about my setup: CPU: Ryzen 5000 GPU: Nvidia 3000 ] OS: Debian 12 DE: Gnome (whatever version ships with deb 12) Whatever it’s called: x11
I also have a dedicated server if pi-hole blacklists exist for this.
Another note: I apologize if this is considered the promotion of proprietary software, but I am more looking for tips on minimizing the risks of proprietary software rather than trying to promote it. For what it’s worth, I always try to convince my friends to switch to GNU+Linux as well as other foss.
TLDR: How can I game privately on debian 12?
Thank you in advance for any responses.
Your question is a bit of a paradox. The simplest answer is to say that you can’t. “Gaming” just means using the propriatery software a company built, and online gaming also means connecting to their server (unless you emulate your own, but that’s becoming more rare these days).
But the longer and more fair answer is to say that absolute privacy isn’t necessarily realistic or desirable for all, and you are looking for the best compromise that works for you.
If using linux is important to you, I think valve has been doing a very good job porting a lot of their library and making it compatible with linux through proton. I used that for a while, but I have to say I didn’t like the bunch of random files games would pollute my system with.
I guess my suggestion would be to have a dedicated system for gaming (either by dual-booting, or a vm with pci passthrough for performance, or a different system altogether like another pc or steam Deck). Only use an identity meant for gaming with that system, and keep practicing a healthy separation of concerns there.
Finally as a game dev, I will invite you to not pirate games you like, especially from smaller creators.
Sorry I meant to get back to you and forgot. I have ethical issues with using drm, however I do own legal copies of the games that I play regularly so I hope that makes up for it. I don’t like pirating for the sake of pirating, but basically any form of digital media uses drm now, and piracy is really the only way around it that I know of. Interestingly a paper (I apologize I could not find it but its title was something to the effect of Displacement of Copyrighted Content in the EU) found that game piracy had a slightly positive overall effect on sales, acting as a sort of free sample that allowed people who wouldn’t have bought something otherwise to be sure they wanted to. It was not enough to be statistically significant, if I recall correctly, but is interesting nonetheless. Also thank you for your response. I think I will dual boot and have a dedicated gaming partition. I think I will pirate so that I can run the games offline, but I will continue to buy any games I play from smaller creators.