I recently moved back from windows to fedora again. (Boo windows, whatever, i was forced to use it for school, and they wouldn’t let me run it in a hypervisor. That’s not the point of the post.)

I don’t pirate software often, but sometimes it’s morally warranted. In this case, the software that i want to use (chessbase) costs upwards of $220 for a license in my country and it’s not even all that great, but FOSS alternatives like en croissant and pawn appetite aren’t too spectacular either. For instance, one issue with both of them is that engines refuse to calculate any set-up position where a king is castled, citing “invalid castling rights.” Unfortunately, because of these kinds of issues, chessbase is still somehow the leading industry standard for localized chess software. I’m not gonna die without a copy of chessbase, but the alternatives are not well maintained and id like to use it to store my PGNs and whatnot, but the price is egregious for what it is.

Now that that’s all out of the way, how has your experience been using windows keygen software and other tools for the seven seas on linux? I haven’t even bothered trying because last time i tried to use bottles for (legal) windows software i ran into issue after issue. All of my piracy has only been committed on windows because i just never really needed to pirate anything on linux and it seemed like a hassle anyway considering illegal software distributions are all made and shipped natively for windows, and linux has free alternatives for almost everything.