Any service requires investment, though. What pays Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, etc.?

Can’t give precise numbers, but at least that I can notice, despite greatly filtering what I check, there’s enough stuff to make running out of stuff to check rather unlikely. Besides, as I started using RSS feeds a lot recently, mainly for federated platforms (not just Lemmy ones), and the reader I use can hide posts marked as read, it’s being a struggle to lower the number of posts to read in comparison to the sum of posts automatically pulled during the set up of each link.

An AI is as good as its sources, and skimming through the domains from the posts, quite a few of those don’t seem like very reliable ones.

Doesn’t appear to have a RSS feed either, and doesn’t seem like Nitter supports it. 😔

Is your drive where you install games automatically mounted by the system? In case something changed in your system, does it have the same path as Steam expects it to? And is the drive a separated storage? And though it may sound like a stupid question, I think it’s important to ask also, are you sure it’s on the storage you think it is?

If you want to gradually move away from closed and/or paid software, afaik, the only way is through unlocking the bootloader and uninstalling programs through there.

Alternatively, there is the nuclear option, to replace the whole system, and start from zero with a distro as close as possible from AOSP. Worth noting it also requires unlocking the bootloader.

About the tool, thanks. I’ll keep it in mind.

About Heroic, it allows installing several versions of a few forks of Wine, Proton and Proton-GE included, and it’s installed on a folder specific from Heroic, instead of installing on the whole system.

Alternatively, or perhaps even concurrently, you can have a Proton instance without having Steam installed. Dunno how it works on Lutris, but besides being able to install Proton manually, you should also be able to install a few different versions of it through Heroic too. Dunno other means for that but probably are.

Sadly I couldn’t think of a better way yet. 😔

Though not due to piracy, I also end up with a lot of repeated, redundant and/or unwanted files, so I’m often having to delete them.

I see. That’s sad. But thanks for clarifying it!

Not ideal, but what I do is to load all musics onto VLC, open the list view (Ctrl L on Linux), let the list fully load, sort by song name and check what appears repeated or that I don’t want for other reasons. It also helps if the songs are metadata-rich, such as the ones bought from Bandcamp and ITunes (not Apple Music), so it’s easier to differentiate them (given this community, I have no clue how/where from yours are). And lastly, there’s a little plugin I found a while back that helps a bunch, vlc-delete, which adds the option to delete the currently playing file, and that, at least in the Linux version, benefits from motor memory since it can be executed with a quick succession of 2 Alt shortcuts.

The Reddit-inspired instances like the Mbin and Lemmy-based ones may be of interest for you. The Lemmy ones, from what I can tell, always hide the follower list, and the Mbin ones allow the user to choose between showing and not showing. Also, both seem to be able to connect to Twitter-like instances, though UI for that part in the Mbin ones is pretty barebones and the Lemmy ones mix them up.

I can conjecture some things, though I can’t be 100% sure on either:

First, maybe it’s fanatics/fanboys that don’t like competition making their platform less relevant. Second, it’s paid actors complaining. Third, it’s robot accounts making posts. Fourth, as proposed in the OP, people are getting the wrong impression due to noisy and problematic bubbles. Fifth, people being scared of leaving their comfort zone. Sixth, a mix of either some or all the previous possibilities.

Whether it’s a rage-click community, a community made for an agenda, or both, I don’t know, but in either cases, I wouldn’t see as surprising for the mods in such a community to be very trigger-happy. Best you can do, I think, is to block communities and individuals with such a profile, and to recommend others to not engaging (remember to explain why if you do it, btw).

I’d have 4 main solutions I can think of, and that can be used together if needed:

• VMs for running Steam and for games that MUST use Steam.
• Emulators, wrappers and source ports for games that allow that, e.g. BSNES for running River Girls Zero, Joiplay / Artemis / EasyRPG / AquariaOSE for games that use compatible engines, etc.
• Having a separated computer you can use 100% offline (requires sideloading games)
• The annoying idea some users give that strays from the original question, but that I think that is valid for once - to get the games from places that openly distribute it DRM free

Mint seems decent all around. No cutting edges nor it’s specialized in any areas, but it’s a jack of all trades, and rather stable.

Blocking, yeah.

Putting the tone aside, I usually browse the All tab for that reason, and also because subscribing in Lemmy is weirder than it was on Kbin (even if it doesn’t crash the page like Kbin did). Nothing personal against the communities, and sure, it’s an exercise on patience, but after some time, the results become noticeable as my feed gets fine-tuned into what I want to see.

Something I personally do is to load games from their entries in the start menu. And when there’s no installer to set the start menu item, a program like Alacarte, or manually editing the files that handle those entries on Linux, the .desktop files. Alternatively, linking the executable files to either Heroic or Steam can also be viable.

As for how Linux handles executables, if it’s a native Linux program, you usually need to set the read-write-execute permissions to be able to launch them. Tutorials usually suggest to run chmod 777 /path/to/executable, or other variants that set full permissions to all users and user groups, but as a security concern, I would suggest running chmod 700 /path/to/executable, as this would give the full permissions only to the current user (there’s a bit of a formula to come up with this number, btw).

And regarding VMs, they are as fast as the hardware allows minus the host system’s demands, so it will always be slower than baremetal installs. But in some specific cases, it’s still the best option.

Regarding gaming support, Heroic Launcher also help a bunch, since you can easily set up multiple versions of forks of Wine (Valve’s Proton being one), or even to use the system ones.

About the wifi issue, maybe it is some oddly specific hardware that the devs tackled only in Mint 22. And in a bit of a humorous tone, what’s learning without a bit of struggle? 😅

And lastly, besides dual boot, you could also set up a VM with the secondary system(s) you want. Just worth noting hardware-dependent games, e.g. many from the Windows 9x time, will struggle on VMs.