I just use Lutris/Heroic

Steamrip are ready to play games with wine.

proton with steam and add the cracked games to steam though that carries a significant risk of a ban

Never heard that, and can testify that's absolute nonsense.

For anything outside of steam,epic etc you can use Heroic Games launcher (i personally use it for Epic Games,itch.io and games outside of Steam)
Ik it's a Epic Games,GOG and Amazon Games launcher but it works for Games outside of any store

I'm going to assume you're using official, paid-for GOG offline installers. Other installers will work the same way.

I have a directory for non-Steam games mounted at /games. Every game has its own directory, and a game and prefix directory for the game content and the wineprefix respectively. For example, for Cyberpunk 2077 you would run mkdir -p /games/cyberpunk-2077/{game,prefix} to create the directory tree all at once.

To install the game, I simply use wine to execute the installer with the prefix directory set as the wineprefix: WINEPREFIX=/games/cyberpunk-2077/prefix wine SETUP_FILE_NAME.exe. The root filesystem will be mounted as the Z: drive -- use Z:\games\cyberpunk-2077\game as the install path.

I use Lutris to launch the game. Add a new game, choose "Locally installed game", then set the executable path to the game's main executable, the working directory to the game directory (usually works, some games expect a different working directory), and the prefix to the prefix directory.

The best place to ask is Linux Crack Support.

Bottles is the way. You can set up bottles (Wine prefixes, or environments) with predefined libraries and Proton for games. You simply run the installer through the GUI or add a shortcut to the executable.

Honestly mostly the same as on windows. You can try running the game with proton too. Also https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/[email protected]

I run Windows software such as games with Proton, I used Wine before. The frontend to launch it doesn't matter a lot to me. Lutris, Bottles, Steam... they mostly all work. But honestly, I don't pirate many games these days. I'm more for older games and since we got Steam sales and Humble Bundles, I get a lot of them there. At least the Windows games. I haven't found a legal source for old console games, but we have a lot of emulators for N64, PSP, Arcade machines ... as well. And great frontends like Emulationstation.

There are many ways to do it, I have never used Steam like that but never heard of a ban due to cracked games. My preferred way would be using Lutris, but I have not used it in a while.

The general concept is:

1. Create a container/app in Lutris, selecting your Wine preferred version.
2. Open the container (so that it creates the directory files)
3. Copy the contents of the game into the container
4. Point the Lutris container to the exe and done.
5. Run game

These steps are not precise but the general overview. You can even switch Wine versions if needed without the need to reinstall.