Is there a consensus on how to run Steam and games isolated from the main system? I’ve seen Flatpak mentioned in some Reddit post but I’m not sure how good the separation is. Everything about Flatpak sounds like an early work in progress, but I can be convinced otherwise.
I don’t trust Steam or the closed source games at all. Currently I’ve got a second disk with a separate system for gaming, but I very rarely have the motivation to reboot. I want to game more (and spend less time on social media) but compromising my main OS is out of the question. Stuff in the home directory should be isolated from the games. Ideally no network access too, but Steam will not work in that case.
If someone has seen a ready made guide I’d be happy to read it. Any tips would be nice too.
I’d have 4 main solutions I can think of, and that can be used together if needed:
- VMs for running Steam and for games that MUST use Steam.
- Emulators, wrappers and source ports for games that allow that, e.g. BSNES for running River Girls Zero, Joiplay / Artemis / EasyRPG / AquariaOSE for games that use compatible engines, etc.
- Having a separated computer you can use 100% offline (requires sideloading games)
- The annoying idea some users give that strays from the original question, but that I think that is valid for once - to get the games from places that openly distribute it DRM free
Well, DRM is not the problem here, I don’t trust the games too. DRM or not, they can do what they want with my data.
I’m not saying DRM is good but it’s not in the scope of this post.
Flatpak’s security and sandbox has gotten much better in recent years. I’ve been using Steam via Flatpak for a while now and haven’t run into any issues yet, other than not being able to make desktop shortcuts of my games.
I use Flatseal (another Flatpak application) to further restrict my Flatpak’s permissions) The default Flatpak permissions for Steam aren’t bad IMO (at least when compared to other Flatpaks) but you can tweak it to your liking using Flatseal.
If you want to take it a step further, I would recommend using Goldberg’s Steam Emulator, which is FOSS, and it will allow you to bypass Steamworks DRM (which is Valve’s very weak DRM) for games which solely use Steamworks DRM.
I find that the overwhelming majority of my games just use the Steamworks DRM if any, but YMMV. Using Goldberg’s Steam Emulator is also a good way of preserving your library if, in the unfortunate case, Valve decides to remove a title from your library for whatever stupid licensing reason they come up with.
After freeing your games using Goldberg’s Steam Emulator you then could use the Flatpak of Lutris and disable network access for Lutris/further restrict permissions it has to the rest of your system using Flatseal.
I don’t think the goldberg emu allows bypassing the steam drm. what it allows is to run steam-dependent games without steam. For the rare games that use steam drm, you have to patch it with a patcher tool
Amazing, this way I could restrict network access with normal tools like firejail instead of fiddling with Flatpak. I’ve never heard of this tool before: https://mr_goldberg.gitlab.io/goldberg_emulator/
People are right about flatpak - it will generally keep stuff out of your actual root/home directory. But like you implied, the steam flatpak is unofficial so you may run into issues. With that said, I’ve used it and know many people who use it without any problems.
And depending on the game, you might be able to run it directly with steam offline, or even straight from the executable without steam open at all.
Of course this isn’t airtight, but there are ways to check the permissions granted to flatpak applications. And IMO it works well enough for games. Ofc this depends on how paranoid you are and your reasons for wanting this (fear of a game being a virus, not wanting clutter in home, wanting protection from a bug that would delete data, etc.).