Linux Cracking Bible – The GNU Testament | Hacker News Reader

Linux Cracking Bible – The GNU Testament

github.com

67 pointshggh11 comments

Remember kids, piracy isn't cool. By stealing software (especially indie software) you are robbing real people of profits that they most likely deserve.

But man, is it nice to see people ensuring that you can truly own the software you purchase.

nit: Profit is money after expenses. You may be robbing real people of money covering expenses, which seems much worse. Better to use revenue or income.

Piracy is very cool. It allows people left out on the price-consumption curve to enjoy what everyone else is enjoying. Usually children, students, and people living in third world countries with low incomes or bad exchange rates. I pirated tons of software when I was younger, you probably couldn't price software cheap enough that I would (or could) actually buy it. Now it simply isn't worth my time to pirate.

I still pirate roms and games that aren't sold though :)

I just finished my Retro Arcade catalog earlier this evening. I'm setting up a pi5 in our living room. It's super exciting to be able to expose my children to my favorite childhood games all the way up to the PlayStation 1 on a single device.

Reminds me of this great quote from the developer of Ultrakill: “culture shouldn't exist only for those who can afford it”

https://x.com/HakitaDev/status/1797245014268891236

The guide is primarily written from an "offline game preservation" standpoint and assuming that you already own a copy, but I'm not naive as to who will also get value out of it, and I do include enough info that non-owners can still follow along. I'm also fairly morally-flexible when it comes to demoing games before purchase, especially considering that publishers often have zero concern whether the product they're selling me will even work on my Linux machine - hopefully that is not something I will even need to think about in a decade from now.

But yes, in general I fully agree that you should support when you can, and even from a practical standpoint it's much easier to keep games up-to-date when you own a copy.

Is it piracy if I pay for it afterwards?

Remember kids, piracy is cool. By copying software, you are living in a utopian future 100 years in the future instead of putting on your clown make up and pretending as if digital goods follow the same supply/demand laws as physical goods.

It's nice to see people ensuring that you can truly own digital goods 100 years before it becomes the obvious standard.

Hey everyone. Original author here, glad you're enjoying the guide. I don't know how you even found it, but grats on that too. Happy to answer any questions here (for the next day or so) or on the discussions tab of the repo.

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.

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.

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