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Running Steam and games securely (lemm.ee)

submitted 3 weeks ago by oldfart@lemm.ee to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.ml

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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.

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[–] Codilingus@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I did the vfio passthrough years ago, rocking two monitors like I always have.

Top monitor was Linux only via Display Port. Bottom was Linux via HDMI, and Windows via DP. Small cheap AMD GPU for all the Linux, and big boy AMD GPU was only for Windows VM.

I would turn on the VM, and then toggle my bottom monitor from HDMI to DP to game, and then the reverse when finished. Could be done all the same without the top monitor.

A neat trick I figured out, was the Windows VM was actually a bare metal Windows install on a separate SSD that could be booted into normally, but also passed through to the VM when using Linux.

[–] oldfart@lemm.ee 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Which hypervisor? I tried booting a physical install this year with VirtualBox and two decades ago with VMWare Player and both times ended up with damaged bootloader that was unable to boot from bare metal

[–] Codilingus@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

My memory isn't the best on this, as it was close to 10 years ago, I just now had to look up some YouTube's and images to see which things I recognized.

I was using Arch and I'm pretty sure I managed everything with Virtual Machine Manager.

I know 100% I used vfio, and I wanna say qemu as well.

The one thing I remember most, was I couldn't use Virt Manager's GUI to just straight up add the Windows SSD. I had to use the GUI to add something similar, but then had to go and directly edit the XML. It took me forever through trial and error, but I wanna say I finally was like fuck it, and changed the XML entry to just straight up /dev/nvme and it worked.

Never had any bootloader issues. I think I let Windows have its own EFI boot partition it installs automatically, but also gave my arch install its own EFI boot partition as well. When I wanted to boot Windows bare metal, I would just press F8 on boot and select the Windows Boot manager entry, as opposed to booting into systemd-boot and selecting Arch or Windows.