I can't help but approach this with extreme skepticism but so far it's sounding like this is not bullshit.

Mind totally blown.

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My take on the current situation:

Native gaming on linux has gotten basically nowhere (but this 1. doesn't matter too much and 2. will change; see below). (Please don't take this as a slight to any of the intrepid developers who are doing great stuff on linux native! It happens, it's just relatively rare.)

API/ABI compatibility for windows OS system calls and 3rd party DLL's is basically a "solved problem" and probably has been for longer than many of us realize. Yes, if you play enough you are likely to eventually hit some issue where a game refuses to run because of some kind of linking issue, but at this point this seems to be far more of a distribution problem and a problem with defaults than a technical one. It's getting easier to fix (I think eventually Bottles will make it truly easy), and importantly it is fixable by "mere mortals", meaning it takes mostly general computing knowledge to fix, not the PhD in a highly specialized fields such as...

The graphics API's are still a real problem. dxvk is truly amazing, I'm tempted even to apply the label "miracle", but it's not perfect and the people who can make meaningful contributions to it are very few and far between. I get the impression that it's become somewhat optimized toward unreal engine and unity, which I suppose was inevitable, the problems you tend to run into on more specialized game engines (especially the "in-house" engines of the big studios) get a lot weirder. I have found "Deathloop" to be an illuminating example (it seemingly has a large variety of subtle issues depending on the details of hardware and dxvk version, though it's encouraging that it seems to be "mostly playable" anyway).

While I don't think it matters very much anymore whether a game is linux native or windows native (a huge accomplishment to be sure), it still matters whether a game uses DX or Vulkan, and Vulkan adoption has been worryingly slow. Yes, all the major game engines support it, but games which provide it as an option are few and far between. Whether this will get better depends on the cause: I *think* it is the case that the main reason why developers choose not to provide it as an option even if they are using Unreal or unity and for them it basically boils down to a compile option is that these developers still care way more about old windows machines using graphics cards that can't support vulkan than they do about linux.

As for what I predict for the near future: I'm not really that worried about gaming getting sucked back into the Windows prison entirely. There's too much going against Windows these days, including other powerful parties with huge financial interests in making sure the clock doesn't get turned back (e.g. amazon and google). What I think is far more likely is that we will continue to see a fragmentation and the situation on PC's will start to more closely resemble what game consoles looked like 10 or so years ago. There will continue to be (significant numbers of high profile) games that can't be run in linux because they are using some kind of anti-cheat that refuses to run on anything but windows, or the developers have released it inside some MS proprietary nightmare store, or whatever, just as there will be games which only release on platforms which make it far more likely they can be run comfortably on linux.

Well... that post was way longer than I intended... but the TL;DR is:
You can mostly just run games on linux now and not worry about.
And to that there can be no response other than :grin::grin::grin:

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Hello Games really does not want me to uninstall this game.

Aside from simply being a lot of fun, No Man's Sky is great at showing off how perfectly windows games can run on linux if they are compiled with vulkan in the first place and serves as a great example for the message to send to game developers: "It doesn't really matter if you have a linux native version or not, just compile with vulkan!"

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I've pretty much only ever used Arch just to learn what it was like to install it. I have been told that it's a lot less stable than Manjaro and the couple of weeks Manjaro waits makes a big difference.

I have been using Manjaro on multiple machines for around 5 years now, and I love it. I've had basically no problems with upgrades: a few very minor ones that were their fault and a few less minor but easily fixed ones that were my fault. I suggest that anyone not happy with arch try Manjaro out, it's given me very little motivation to check out other distros.

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I guess the thing I'm confused about is, sure on my linux install there are all sorts of things I need `sudo` for, but it's not actually read only.

I'm not really criticizing valve for the choice, I'm just saying I can't imagine myself ever doing this.

The awesome thing about steamdeck is that there is absolutely nothing stopping you from e.g. just installing manjaro instead.

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Yikes. It's pretty hard for me to imagine this doing anything other than making it more difficult to fix things.

I guess I do not envy the people who are responsible for marketing and distributing this stuff to the general public. I failed even to get a non-technical family member to use a password manager that she had to unlock.

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I guess I haven't been paying attention. The filesystem on SteamOS is read only by default? Why in the world would anyone do that? It seems so insane to me I'm not sure I'm reading it right.

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Does that mean this is never going to work on desktop without modification? How does Easy Anti-Cheat even know it's on desktop?

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Awesome! Super useful. I also love that it is available both as `AppImage` and via flatpak.

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