Hi,
I recently built a new gaming computer and have been contemplating about the OS.
I prefer to move away from windows given obvious reasons and do like using Linux, but my experience with my steam deck has taught me that pirating games in Linux is hit or miss.
I played around with windows LTSC and honestly, seems like windows without the bloatware.
So question is, how is game pirating on Linux (in a desktop, not steam deck).
Is it as smooth as windows or should I just say fuck it and accept that my gaming computer has to stay windows for another generation?
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.
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.
So I tried to get a couple games working on my steam deck that didn’t work at all. I do remember trying to run thing with wine, but just gave up and installed the game on a windows computer.
So would I just google Lutris and go from there?
I’m not sure what a good written guide for manually running linux games is off the top of my head, but generally yeah you install Lutris, install the latest Proton-GE version through e.g. ProtonUp-QT, create a game entry in Lutris with a “Prefix” location dedicated to your wine prefix, pick Proton-GE as the runner, copy the game into the generated prefix, target the normal EXE, and launch it. Sometimes if a game isn’t launching you’ll need to use “winetricks” to install vcrun2022 and dotnet48 dependencies into the wine prefix, since each Wine prefix is sort of like a copy of windows, and windows has a handful of dependencies that games sometimes rely on. I’ve heard you can also just add the game as a “non-steam game” to steam, but I’ve not bothered as Lutris gives more control. Again I can’t vouch for any specific guides, but the keywords from this post should help target a general direction to move in.
Where do you get installation media for Windows LTSC?
I found a torrent that had windows 11 LTSC, pre activated and with office.
When I made the bootable usb, it had options where I could just opt out of the data collection and all that so it wouldn’t even show that during install.
Pretty good experience. Feels weird to say that about a Microsoft product.
Thanks!
From Microsoft. They actually provide ISO downloads for the 11 LTSC versions, so there’s not really any reason to go grab some random one off totally-legit-software-and-totatlly-not-malware.com or whatever.
Imagine I’m an idiot, do you have a link or description for where to find those? I looked for them some time ago and found nothing. 🥹
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/evalcenter/evaluate-windows-11-iot-enterprise-ltsc
Keep in mind, though, that you’ll still have to do some activation and KMS hackery to make them usable, but you can at least use an installer that’s going to be clean.
Thank you!