[MisterTea]

I just decommissioned my 2011 Windows 7 machine where I did most of my dev work and all of my casual computing such as web stuff and gaming. It ran all of the software I needed plus the Steam games I enjoyed. I had no technical reason to "upgrade" in all that time. In its place now is a kooky Linux machine.

The replacement started off as a toy turned experiment: a 12 core Gen 1 Threadripper with 64GB ECC and a Radeon Pro W5700. I wound up installed Void Linux Musl with XFCE mostly to see how useful a system-d/glibc free Linux machine can be. Turns out very useful if you install bloated Windows-style "applications" like Steam, Discord, Chrome, LibreOffice, etc using Flatpak. You can also setup a glibc chroot if need be but I have not ran into this need yet.

I can watch Hulu and other streaming services just fine in Chrome (haven't tried FF). I can play older AAA games you would never imagine running on Linux such as GTA5 and Skyrim with ZERO configuration other than checking "run this game using proton". However I have yet to get Crysis running :-( Anything I can't get running with Wine I can toss into a VM. And I can run lots of VM's :-)

And if you really miss Windows or want some familiarity back - XFCE + Chicago95 ;-)

[intelVISA]

Yup -- assuming you don't need malware like EAC installed to run online games you can have a surprisingly good game experience on desktop Linux nowadays.

[MisterTea]

Even weird distributions which I expected to be a miserable fight but nope. Just Flatpak it and all the dependency is inside and it just works. Couple that with out of the box AMD GPU support and it's painless. I expect that I could even run Steam on Alpine Linux. My only gripe is Flatpak'd programs like Steam need to be updated separately through Flatpak.

I also have a Nuc hooked to my bedroom TV running Debian and use a similar setup but no Steam (Its mostly a Chrome toaster).