[blooalien]

Used to be that any two of those three things (Laptop, NVIDIA, Linux) together was enough to ensure endless hassle dinkin' with various things to get it all running somewhat halfway right. Nowadays it seems like most everything on Linux is pretty much real deal "plug-n-play" except the odd occasional AAA game publisher goin' all purposely anti-Linux with their DRM or anticheat.

Praise be to Valve / Steam for their massive (and ongoing) push to make gaming viable on Linux for a wider audience outside the "nerd" crowd runnin' WINE from commandline, and various "retro" / classic console emulators (and of course "indie" games). Love bein' able to click "Play" and most games these days just run (despite my bein' one of those "nerds" who ran games in WINE long before Valve ever did). :)

[globular-toast]

Even installing Gentoo today feels like cheating compared to what it was like in the early 2000s. It really does mostly just work these days.

[anthk]

You don't need Steam; you can just use Lutris, where you even have a Flatpak.

[7speter]

Maybe you know this, but steam does more than get games playing on Linux. They (Valve?) have a group that develops drivers for AMD gpus on Linux. Their contributions still may not ve limited to just that primarily, but if there wasn’t Valve it would seem we’d have a lot less to play on Linux at the very least.

[saghm]

A lot of their work on proton also gets upstreamed back into wine, so even for those not using proton, they're still benefiting quite a bit in recent years from all of the work Valve has done on that front.

[anthk]

If drivers are libre, you have them back. Ditto with Proton, Lutris makes installing a gane a non-issue. Flatpak downloads MESA too.

[phatskat]

I remember the days of running WINE, tweaking settings, searching forums, hacking around in kernel modules, yelling at nvidia drivers…kind of miss it lol