prole

Once installed, I think you can often even run the exe of the pirated game through Steam as a "non-steam app" using Proton

Half of the instructions there are installing tools that you only install once, not every game.

And once you set up Lutris, it's pretty trivial to open .exe files with it.

Not sure what quick settings you mean, but have you tried Bazzite yet? I've been using it on my laptop for several months now, and it's been fantastic. Built for gaming, and it seems to already have a ton of shit set up correctly that id normally need to do myself on Arch

Did you try Desktop Mode on the Deck? Makes things a lot easier. Haven't had much issue with things like this with my Steam Deck, but on Linux PC, I've had none. Ever. Try Bazzite, it's built for gaming.

I would just Google, "using bottles/lutris to install game on Linux" and I imagine you could find people walking through it.

What others said... I think I've even run the installer as a non-steam app through Steam using proton and that worked as well. Unless I'm misremembering.

I also play games on this system, so having newer kernel and Mesa versions help.

I guess I'm that guy in this thread constantly bringing up his current distro of choice lol... But have you tried Bazzite? From what I understand it's basically Kinoite but built with gaming in mind.

If you have, I'd be curious as to what differences there were between it and Kinoite...

I recommend giving Bazzite a try for gaming. I switched to it from Arch (well EOS), and it's been wonderful.

I loved EndeavourOS, but I'm just not sure bleeding edge is for me. Mostly because I will forget to update for a week, and suddenly there are 500 updates, all with interconnected dependencies and pacman is just like "wtf dude?"

I'm not sure I really gained any benefit from that over using a more stable release. I switched to Bazzite a few months back, and it's been amazing. Immutable is very interesting, and it's made for the most stable PC I've ever owned.

Highly recommend Bazzite for gamers (or I guess it's good for multimedia too), or if not, one of the other Fedora-based immutable distros.

Do whatever you want, but this kind of thinking will get you nowhere. Especially nowadays.

They don't care about even appearing consistent. It doesn't matter anymore, they won. Now they do what they want.

I've been using Bazzite for a few months now (switched from EndeavourOS, which was great) and it's been amazing. I'm sold on atomic/immutable. I have never had a PC this stable, including every Windows PC I've had.

And it's perfect for gaming. There are weird little tweaks and settings that I had to do on EOS to get my GPU working correctly, etc., and they all just work out of the box in Bazzite (I did get the iso image made specifically for my laptop, which definitely helps). It's super impressive actually.

And distrobox (BoxBuddy comes installed) can be used to access the AUR or whatever if I feel the need to. Just fire up an Arch box, and have at it.

Playing the original Half-Life is like a formative gaming memory for me... It had been such a massive leap from your DOOM 2s and Dukes Nukem. I was super young though, so I don't know how much I cared about the narrative.

HL2, on the other hand...Now that I remember vividly. I remember having to use five CDs to install it because Steam had literally just been invented (for HL2). Having to create a Steam account and log into a service to play a game was so foreign at the time lol...

Might be time to re-play.