Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

If it's a steam pirated game and already extracted, you can just create a dummy steam account, add the executable as non-steam game and run proton from steam (I had good success with proton experimental).

Everything else should be run via Lutris + wine prefixes (or whatever windows subsystem emulator you chose).

It's fairly easy when you know what you're doing but still not as easy as you imagine on Windows itself. I would say, most game run all right? I recently played The last of us I via lutris+wine prefixes. Some fps drops and 1 crash on a 5 hour session, seems pretty reasonable.

However, lutris + wine prefixes are harder to get right depending the wine version installed and what graphic options you want, it can get frustrating specially if you don't know what game needs what windows trick (directx9, vscru2015...).

I had mostly good success rate with the staging version of wine (I think that's what proton experimental on steam is) and doing it wrong, you can go from a burning messsy non playable game to something as smooth as on Windows.

So yeah, it involves more personal implication to get it right and yes it's still harder to play pirated games on Linux than on Windows but easier than 5 years ago!

In my experience, there is nearly no difference between windows and linux when it comes to piracy. There are a few games that linux can't run (anticheat), but generally that shouldn't be an issue for games that you would typically pirate. Linux does have a standard learning curve though, and you'll need to get familiar with Lutris or some other Wine prefix manager to manage your games. If you're dedicated to moving to linux, game piracy should not be a deciding factor.

I used to repack games for a group in Linux pirating. Most of the time, there was no tweaking. Only the badly optimized ones like ragnarok, elden ring new dlc, etc needed some other work.

You can install games from dodi, fitgirl, online-fix, all just fine. You can also download linux repacks from jc141.

How does one install pirated games (e.g. from fitgirl) on Linux?

You can run the same translation layer that Steam uses for your pirated games, compatibility will be similar to what protondb reports.

I still dual boot with Windows for gaming, so I can't comment on the next gaming as much, but I will say that LTSC is everything that it seems to be (or not be).

Windows without any bullshit, I used it for years.

I use windows solely for ease of gaming so I haven't bothered to replace the stock, but if you do keep using Windows, LTSC is definitely the way to go.

as far as the articles going around, Linux is catching up but is not yet as effortless less as Windows for gaming specifically.

Use Bottles with the Sandbox option enabled (and sound enabled). So, native performance but without access to files outside the Wine prefix (virtual Windows folder where the game is installed) and without network access. This way, you don't have to worry about games phoning home, containing a crypto miner or ransomware.

Also, forget about FitGirl repacks on Linux, most don't unpack correctly.

Where do you get installation media for Windows LTSC?