I never had an issue with Lutris + a pirated copy. It’s trivial to find the anadius rip around in a torrent. Fuck the EA launcher.

Also, does anyone seriously think they’d do this without some sort of carve out for Steam to work? I can’t imagine a worse idea at this time than for a desktop oriented distro to break the gaming use case that hard.

Yeah, I was part of those arguments too. In a perfect world Linux would have enough market share to warrant native ports, but Proton getting Wine one-click integrated into Steam and easily targetable is a more realistic bridge to that scenario than holding out on principle. As it is Linux gaming is in the best shape it’s ever been in thanks to Proton.

I also think the argument held more weight 20 years ago, before we started packaging up end user apps in giant self-contained images regularly.

This is a non-issue. If you’re a gaming company in the era of Proton, it makes more sense to just focus on Windows issues than to open yourself to support requests from people running any brand of Linux. Proton is just so much easier to target than standalone Linux and you can serve the Linux community / Steam Deck users without needing any actual expertise.