The latter - downloading the windows cracked version and yeah, wine or proton. It works beautifully.

That’s when there is no native linux version obviously; these days you can also find pirate versions of those when they exist (most notably on rutracker).

I think there is one person putting out repacks especially made for Linux mind you (can’t remember their name though found it, it’s johncena141), including specific wine versions and so on in the repack, though I’ve never used them