Would installing an OS on an external ssd and booting into that to run pirated software while blocking access to other drives in your system or physically unplugging them be one way?
Or are there better ways to isolate the software you run and use as much as possible?
I just block apps in firewall. Never had problems with pirate software, only some I couldnt get working.
What are you trying to protect from?
You can also run another OS in VM, but performance is questionable.
If you are afraid of losing data, you need backup anyway
Just didn’t seem like a good idea to run pirated software of games on your primary system even if the stuff is from a “trusted” source.
Which was why I was wondering what steps people take to play games for those that try to lower the risks.
If you want to play games in VM you will probably need qemu/kvm and sepparate GPU for passthrough. Otherwise your VM will struggle to load anything serious. But I think others use that mostly to run windows apps on linux machine or simmilar. Maybe you can just dualboot from 2nd drive, it should be 100% safe if you unplug your main drive, but thats probably overkill. Im no expert, just putting it here so you can google