What’s best practice to safely play pirated games on Linux? Looking to mitigate potentially malicious executables from wrecking havoc on my system.

  • EP51L0N@sh.itjust.works
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    9 months ago

    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.

    • EP51L0N@sh.itjust.works
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      9 months ago

      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.

      • Zeon@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        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.

        • EP51L0N@sh.itjust.works
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          9 months ago

          KVM requires a second gpu to utilize gpu-acceleration. Unlike VMware, which can just steal vram from your one card and use it for the vm.

          • Zeon@lemmy.world
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            9 months ago

            Actually, KVM doesn’t necessarily require a second GPU for acceleration. If you have a CPU with integrated graphics, you can use that for the host system and pass through a dedicated GPU to the VM.

              • Zeon@lemmy.world
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                9 months ago

                Referring to integrated graphics as a ‘second GPU’ is somewhat misleading. They do provide additional graphics processing, but they’re part of the CPU and not a separate, dedicated graphics card.

                • Sethayy@sh.itjust.works
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                  9 months ago

                  But it still processes GPU code, telling anyone you can run vulkan on your ‘fancy CPU’ they’ll probably look at you like youre crazy

                  Also then for a device without a dedicated, would you consider not to have a gpu?

                  • Zeon@lemmy.world
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                    9 months ago

                    Running Vulkan on integrated graphics isn’t the point here. Integrated graphics in a CPU are not what people typically refer to as a GPU. So, if someone asks what GPU I have, I wouldn’t say ‘Intel HD Graphics’ or such; that’s just the integrated graphics capability of the processor, not a discrete GPU.

          • Sethayy@sh.itjust.works
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            9 months ago

            You could do a setup with a laptop/other pc and use a vnc server. Requires not too much setup with systemd and x11vnc, and provides all inputs + greater host/guest isolation (ie the jellyfish exploits)1

            edit: want to add onto this that no one would probably ever spend the time to implement an exploit like that in just a cracked game, but hey its still worth mentioning

      • rtxn@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        I can’t speak for VMware’s technology, but the company just got bought by Broadcom, so treat them with Red Hat-like suspicion.

        • EP51L0N@sh.itjust.works
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          9 months ago

          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

      • Sethayy@sh.itjust.works
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        9 months ago

        I wonder how VMware does this, cause in the case of nvidia the gpu is usually pretty locked down and requires some girhub-arguably legal code to work on kvm