I’ve always bought my games on steam or OFFICIAL key resellers (GMG) since I was an adult, but sometimes it has got really expensive.
Do you consider ‘cracked games’ safe for your PC, your data, and finally your privacy?
You should always support developers, but it’s not always possible.
Considered safe only because people haven’t noticed anything malicious happening? Yeah, that’s still a no go for me; just because people haven’t noticed, doesn’t mean it’s not happening.
If You can afford to pay, then cool. Most people that pirate can’t afford the games/apps anyway, so it’s not really a matter of asking if it is safe to pirate but what site are safe to pirate from. Also, Pirates tend to be tech savvy from getting screwed a few times when they were younger (Ex: me), so a good chunk most certainly know how to detect viruses.
You think you know how to detect a virus, but you only know how to detect a virus that doesn’t hide it’s actions.
It’s not about paying for software or pirating it. It’s about if you pirate software, should you run it on bare metal, a VM, or on a machine with nothing else on it.
I think pirating software is perfectly fine, but I’d never run it on bare metal on a machine with other stuff on it.
I hope you compile all your own software from verified sources then rather than downloading a ready-built Linux distro with binary packages.