11 ms·

That is a nice guide, it is useful simply for getting games to work with Lutris and Wine, regardless of the cracking. Note that some of the tools you recommend

That is a nice guide, it is useful simply for getting games to work with Lutris and Wine, regardless of the cracking. Note that some of the tools you recommend are not exactly fully open but come from 'cs.rin' and I'm not sure (that is I don't know) how open or safe downloads from that community would be. To be fair, I also don't blindly trust downloads from Github :) I'm really glad that now I might be able to play many of my old Steam purchases without the intrusive online requirement. It would be cool to self publish this as a PDF or similar - though of course I would pirate it.

YoteZip 2y ago
Yeah, unfortunately not everything is fully open source, but a lot of it is (sometimes with less-standard repos or just a source download), and all of it is at least community-created/maintained. If you're set on only using open source tools, the DRMs that you're most likely to run into are happily the ones that also have open source tooling. Hopefully more of the other protections will be broken by open-source tools in the future (some of which already are, but the tooling is inferior to the community tools at the moment), or developers open source their existing tools. In the meantime, I recommend blocking network access and running games sandboxed anyway; I trust closed-source proprietary games far less than the closed-source tools. The cs.rin community seems to be slowly moving towards game preservation as an inevitable conclusion when collaborating on and developing these tools, because if we're being honest it takes zero effort to just grab the 0day scene release of a game if all you want to do is get something for free. The point of making universal tools that work for everything is to fully preserve every game regardless of DRM. It's interesting how thin the line is between game preservation and piracy, as there are several tools nearly the same as those used in the guide that are hosted and promoted by legitimate sites like PCGamingWiki. Although I've watched the tide shift a bit since the Steam Deck has released, the cs.rin community still has a noticeable blindspot on Linux and open source, with several extremely intelligent developers unwilling to even give Linux a shot, sticking to Windows and keeping their tools closed-source because that's just how things have always been done. And yes, you can definitely airgap pretty much any Steam game without any issues using this guide unless it uses Denuvo, and I'd recommend doing so a few times just to see how easy it is. It's fun tech to play with, and as a Linux fanboy it warms my heart to exert as much power as possible over the software on my computer.

YoteZip 2y ago

Yeah, unfortunately not everything is fully open source, but a lot of it is (sometimes with less-standard repos or just a source download), and all of it is at least community-created/maintained. If you're set on only using open source tools, the DRMs that you're most likely to run into are happily the ones that also have open source tooling. Hopefully more of the other protections will be broken by open-source tools in the future (some of which already are, but the tooling is inferior to the community tools at the moment), or developers open source their existing tools. In the meantime, I recommend blocking network access and running games sandboxed anyway; I trust closed-source proprietary games far less than the closed-source tools. The cs.rin community seems to be slowly moving towards game preservation as an inevitable conclusion when collaborating on and developing these tools, because if we're being honest it takes zero effort to just grab the 0day scene release of a game if all you want to do is get something for free. The point of making universal tools that work for everything is to fully preserve every game regardless of DRM. It's interesting how thin the line is between game preservation and piracy, as there are several tools nearly the same as those used in the guide that are hosted and promoted by legitimate sites like PCGamingWiki. Although I've watched the tide shift a bit since the Steam Deck has released, the cs.rin community still has a noticeable blindspot on Linux and open source, with several extremely intelligent developers unwilling to even give Linux a shot, sticking to Windows and keeping their tools closed-source because that's just how things have always been done. And yes, you can definitely airgap pretty much any Steam game without any issues using this guide unless it uses Denuvo, and I'd recommend doing so a few times just to see how easy it is. It's fun tech to play with, and as a Linux fanboy it warms my heart to exert as much power as possible over the software on my computer.