professional software developer, amateur coyote 🏳️🌈
Yes, and you can crack those yourself as well. Goldberg Steam Emulator works on Linux Steamworks API games, and you can unwrap SteamDRM from Linux executables with pyUnstub. Sometimes you’ll need to fake a local Steam runtime for Linux games as well (Windows games can also have this problem I think, but it’s much more rare for some reason).
Anything native Linux that uses a DRM that’s not Steam-based is probably rare and custom.
If I were to guess, it should be easy to pick up if you know what you want to do with it. I know Flatpaks use bubblewrap to accomplish their goals, and you can see an extensive example of bubblewrap here.
I may be biased because I already know how, but to me defeating DRM using the community tools is really trivial and I tend to use Steam copies of games because I like the Steamworks features that I can emulate with Goldberg. Even when given a choice between a GOG copy and Steam copy, I usually pick Steam. It’s sort of a weird decision for me to make for permanent archival because I really hate DRM but the DRM versions have more features (achievements, auto-LAN, etc) and are negated with a local DLL so is it really DRM at that point?
I deny network on all my games unless I have a good reason to allow it - almost never have problems with them being mad about it as long as their DRM is emulated/defeated. I use bubblewrap’s bwrap --unshare-net --dev-bind / / as a command prefix in Lutris to do so.
Most game cracks work just fine through WINE. You just need to get the game extracted into the WINE prefix and have the crack applied, then point Lutris at it and it will work fine. If you find a specific crack isn’t working, you can probably find another that does, or crack it yourself using simple tools that are always Linux-compatible. I wrote a guide on using these tools for reference.
Putting aside morality, from a money-in -> money-out perspective you’ll pay much less for a VPN than you would buying your media legit, and it’s much safer to have one enabled if you’re using public swarms. You’re not paying to pirate as much as you’re paying to not be harassed by copyright trolls. If you can make it work with a free VPN, more power to you.
VPNs also have other non-piracy uses, so people might already have one purchased anyway - this is another use for it.