You don’t need to use steam to use wine and proton. I do this pretty much every day, playing games from GOG, or from itch.io. where you get the executable for the game doesn’t matter. I’m currently part way through a run of Baldur’s Gate 1 from GOG, and it’s a Windows executable. You could set up a wine prefix manually, but there’s options like lutris, bottles, or play on Linux to handle that for you. I’ve played games from battle.net and ea app as well, all on linux by setting up proton in Lutris.

You can run non-steam windows games on linux as well, even without steam installed.

Dark Souls 2 gives you a very large amount of human effigies that can restore your max HP, and in a very early game area there is a ring you can wear that limits how low your max HP can go. It’s in a chest in a very early game area that you will walk by and see guaranteed in order to progress. What I think is more interesting is how you think it’s the norm and expected that you should be able to play through an action game and rarely die. It’s okay to enjoy power fantasy games, where dying means you fail - and you just get to retry the part you failed. But that doesn’t mean that enjoying the process of learning an enemy patterns and overcoming adversity is insane. Those games are not power fantasy action games, you are supposed to feel weak. Because when you feel weak and then you kill that damn boss anyways, it’s one of the best feelings ever in gaming. On top of that, a lot of the consumables that you’re talking about you can buy infinite of. Like I said, the games aren’t that hard, enemy patterns are usually pretty simple with only a few attacks, and as you move through areas you learn what gimmicks the enemies are going to abuse and can just adapt to them. Most enemies can be easily parried, or you can kill problem enemies with poison arrows or magic from a distance. Often I think that the people who are convinced that souls games are brutal and not fun are people who try to play them like they are some kind of action hero instead of taking advantage of the tools the games give you to use, especially the summons.

The games can certainly be punishing in key areas, and it’s better that newer entries and other soulslikes make an effort to make learning the games be more friendly. Death is punishing, sure. Losing consumables, fighting through the same enemies again, or even just having to run back to a boss - these are all sources of friction in this genre. Up front, I do wish these games had accessibility options, I do want more people to experience what they have to offer. But death really just isn’t as punishing as a lot of people make it out to be. Dark Souls isn’t that hard, in most cases. There’s certainly bullshit, and it takes time to learn enemy patterns, and dying can be bad feeling. I think that without the friction, if you could overcome every location and boss on the first or second try, these games would just kind of suck. So it’s a balance.

I’ve been using linux for years, after windows 10 forced an update at the beginning of a college class I needed the laptop for, and that update took longer than the class. Today though, I use Garuda Linux, but I’ve hopped around between a variety of distros. For many years I’ve kept a small SSD with Windows 10 on it, so I could play League of Legends or run software I couldn’t get to work in WINE. But with EOL now here, and my PC not supported by 11, I finally just cleared that drive so I can store games or movies/shows on it.

I saw this recently and it kind of blew my mind how good the animation is. Highly recommend.

I was in college at the time, I went to class, which I needed my laptop for. I believe it was windows 10? I opened the laptop to start my work, and windows immediately, unprompted, without permission, began an update - an update that took longer than the class lasted. This should never happen, and for me it never does on any Linux distribution I’ve used.

It can be hit or miss from game to game, check out protondb.com if you’re ever having problems getting a game to work, sometimes there’s small tweaks you need to do. Some stuff that uses anti cheat doesn’t work as well, like Valorant or Fortnite. I’ve been gaming on Linux primarily for years though and it’s never been better.

I use Samsung phones for work, it’s really just some UI changes, and they’re genuinely much worse than just stock android. Samsung is just trying to differentiate itself.

I’ve been working on getting the true ending in hollow Knight, and I’m currently trying to beat some of the DLC content. I’m get to play silksong soon

You can select to run them in proton, rather than just normal wine, in lutris. I’ve been doing it to run games from gog for years with few issues, namely games that are old and have the same problems working on windows as well. So… Yes they will?

Linux compatibility is fine. You can pretty easily install gog games by logging into your gof account on lutris. It’ll let you see your whole library and install directly from it, and any games that work in proton will work just fine using proton via lutris. You can also just add your gog game as a non-steam game and run it there.

We don’t usually work with cash. Most people I know don’t carry cash at all, and it’s a pain to get, since most paychecks are direct deposit. You’ve gotta head to an ATM or the bank, or ask for cash at checkout at the store.

They just won’t function properly. There are permissions problems and while some games might work, you will run into games that simply won’t launch, or that have regular crashes, among other issues. I recommend installing the games you want to play on Linux there, and the ones you can’t on windows.

Just putting the ISO directly into the ventoy folder on the USB should just work, it’s odd that you had to mount it and drag the files. If you’re trying to use games installed on one drive between windows and Linux, I do not recommend attempting that. Windows can’t natively read Linux drive formats like ext4, and if you try to play games on an NTFS drive on Linux you WILL run into problems. Your cloud saves should just work normally though.

I’ve had a lot of success using Ventoy for my USB drive writing needs. Every steam game has it’s own folder for it’s virtual windows directory. You want to look in /home/your_name/.steam/steamapps/compatdata The folders are all strings of numbers, each being the ID of the respective steam game. You can find the ID for any steam game just by going in it’s store page and looking at the URL. You don’t usually need to mess with this though, just browse the game files in your /steam/common folder.

Do you expect people to somehow be able to avoid all suffering? There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, and often people don’t recognize the ethical problems with their choices. People purchase clothes they can afford at the shops available to them, and availability of stores that don’t carry animal products is essentially zero. What I find more odd is defending something we know is causing great suffering, simply because vegetarians/Vegans also do end up participating in the perpetuation of different suffering. I’m not better than you because I’m vegan, and most Vegans/vegetarians do not believe that. It’s a take I only hear from people that eat animals.

The soundtrack in Celeste is fantastic

The concepts you’re sharing aren’t slightly right of center, and frankly you’re right for getting banned for saying those things. It’s very odd to roll up to a social space that is maintained very heavily by left-wing people, and be surprised when we don’t let your right-wing “politics” targeting us fly. You shouldn’t be surprised when you use a right-wing dog whistle “Israel has a right to defend itself” when Israel is currently committing genocide, and you end up banned. Listen to yourself.

You can, in fact, learn to draw things yourself. It’s insane to expect artists to work for below a livable hourly wage just because you can’t afford it.