Here's a KMS server emulator, all open source: https://github.com/Wind4/vlmcsd

If you want to skip straight to the piracy, here's an open source package for you, complete with keys, hosted ironically on Microsoft servers, that uses vlmcsd: https://github.com/ekistece/vlmcsd-autokms

It's a pretty clever hack. It runs the KMS emulator locally and fakes the network connection with a TAP device from OpenVPN. Works perfectly.

Why not just run Linux

Likely games - which are probably also pirated.

Ironically, the last time I needed Windows to run a game was because of Denuvo. I wouldn't have needed it if I'd pirated it.

It does not have Win32 or DirectX, for starters

Sure it does: wine. Whether or not it works (and works performantly enough) for what any given person needs it for is another matter, of course.

Honestly I think it's sad how much the community still underestimates gaming.

I tried using wine or even using Steam directly on Linux, but playing any game with 30-40% less performance is ridiculous.

If you really like games, Linux is unusable for anything big.

I've had to dual boot Windows for the last 10 years just to play a game without stuttering, lag, huge FPS drops, etc.

Nothing would make me happier than being able to only use Linux, but until the community takes gaming seriously, people are forced to use Windows.

Sure, if you want to run a recent game, or one that's graphics-intensive, yeah, it might not run well enough for you on wine, and you'll need to dual-boot.

Personally, I don't have that kind of problem, and I suspect I'm not alone. Of the games I play that don't have Linux ports, they run well enough under wine, even on my (recent) laptop with Intel graphics. But I'm a pretty casual gamer, and honestly find it rare that I just must play the type of games that require a high-end Windows rig.

what setup do you have ? Because I play on Linux and I don't appreciate any performance drop. For example, Stellaris and Doom fly's on my machine.

NVIDIA GTX960 with an i7 and 16 GB of memory. That's not the issue.

I'd argue if it was the issue, even Windows wouldn't let me play any of these games with reasonable performance.

Here is the 64 dollar question. What GPU driver?

I have an NVIDIA GTX960.

When playing CS:GO (a relatively old game) I have stuttering, drastic FPS drops and more :(

Do you use the nvidia driver or nouveau which is known to be crap.

NVIDIA ones. I tried with proprietary, MESA and Nouveau. Never managed to get the same experience as on Windows.

It's a shame, because it literally can't be anything but the software. It's the same hardware with different OSes. Might even be windows specific optimizations on the games part, but in the end it doesn't matter.

The bottom line unfortunately is: it's significantly worse.

I wonder if you are actually using the nvidia driver or just installed it. You could trivially have installed the nvidia driver but actually be using nouveau. Running glxinfo in a terminal would probably be informative.

The complexity of setting this up would be a good point to address. Linux Mint for example has a tool to do this for you. This is logically a workaround for nvidia actually contributing an open source driver that doesn't suck.

There is a supposedly much better supported open source driver for new AMD hardware as well. Another thing the community is doing.

If the problem is with the closed source driver there isn't much the community can do. It's very hard to reverse engineer a complex device like a gpu. If the problem isn't games in general but that particular game there again isn't much the community can do.

Throwaway account because I'm sensitive about admitting I do this kind of thing (perhaps moreso than I should be):

In a word: no. KMSpico is kind of perfect. The process happens entirely locally, and is quite technically "clean".

That one hasn't gone offline in years, so I've never thought of this. Perhaps you are right, but I assume that it should be easy enough to find new ones if you need them. I wouldn't consider this approach to be "high maintenance".