Welcome to the world of making software for random people, almost certainly made worse by she being a woman.
As others pointed out, most people do appreciate it, but they tend to be silent about it, whilst a small minority are demanding little whinny bitches (in a non-gendered way) who think they’re owed service and some are even trolls.
To those reading this, I suggest when you get something you like for free you at least give some feedback that you liked it and, if the person has some kind of sponsoring scheme going on and you really like it, consider contributing, if only to incentivise more of the same.
Those on the other side are people too and they will appreciate it.
The way I went about it was putting Linux on a separate disk and then getting the bios to boot from it, leaving Windows untouched (though I can access the files from the Windows drives inside Linux if I need to).
Unless your machine is really old, it should have EFI boot so the Linux installation just registers itself with the bios as a boot possibility but doesn’t actually force anything or change the Windows boot. Then on the bios you have a menu where you can chose were to boot from, and Linux will appear with the name of the distribution you used (because that’s how a distro normally registers itself with the EFI boot during installation) whilst probably your Windows 7 can be booted by choosing the drive were Windows is (because it’s still using the old style of boot process which is based on putting a boot partition at the start of the drive were it’s installed).
My Windows is still there, totally unaware of there being a Linux on the same machine.
The way I suggest you go about it is to check how to get into the bios (if you don’t know already) and the booting stuff in your bios to see if works as I said and you get it, and to see how Windows has its boot set-up there (as I said, for Windows 7 the bios should be booting a disk rather than an EFI entry). Download a Linux distro and put it on a USB flash disk or even an external HD and then try and boot from there (if you can get your bios to boot from the USB Flash disk or external HD then you understood the principle of the thing) - you can even just play around with that Linux distribution you booted from an external source and see if you’re ok with using it (i.e. if the UI is not confusing).
Then if you want to go ahead with it, get yourself a separate SSD (256GB is fine), install it and then you can install a Linux distribution from a USB Flash disk or external disk into it. Just install that Linux entirely in the new drive (since the drive is all for it you can let it just do the automated method of “install on drive”). Don’t tell it to do anything with the Windows drive (if the new drive is not empty - i.e. you got it second hand or were using it for something else - MAKE SURE YOU KNOW FOR SURE WHICH ONE HAS Windows so that you mistakenly install into that one, if the new drive is empty it will show as empty in the installation UI so you know it’s not the Windows one) and Windows will still be there and you can still boot from it if you need to (the point of checking out of how booting worked in the bios beforehand is exactly to make sure you know were is the boot menu on the bios, how to use it and which entry in the boot menu is the one that boots Windows).
In my case I actually had an old Linux in there which I overwrote with the new one that I now use and an old complicated boot mechanism were booting went via the Windows booting stuff which was the one showing me a boot menu, all of which going via a WIndows Boot partition in the same disk as the Linux installation so working around all so that Windows still booted was quite a headache and included some pretty nervous moments, but in your case if you just use a new empty drive for Linux and just chose in the Bios what to boot, it should be pretty straightforward.
Worst case you just have to go back to using that Windows 7.
I went with Pop! OS because it was recommended as being good for gaming and it has out of the box support for Nvidia Graphics cards, which is what I have.
It just worked, no fuss and a quick check on my personal Linux management and gaming on Linux notes folder shows no actual notes for my Pop! OS desktop system (for the games in it I do have a couple of notes, but no for the OS), which means I’ve had zero problems with the actual system so far (I write the notes down if I get a problem I need to figure out how to fix, just in case I get the same problem again and have to fix it again).
Mind you I haven’t mucked about with things like replacing my windows manager or using Wayland instead of X-windows since I don’t see the point in changing what’s not broken and works fine in a system which is supposed to be for relaxing, not experimentation.
I was doing the same thing (I too run my computers into the ground, though I also didn’t want to move to Windows 10 because of all the analytics at the OS level sending data to them MS added to that version, plus and frankly, it worked so I couldn’t be arsed).
I also switched some time ago, pushed by Steam’s impending end of support plus more and more stuff coming out without Windows 7 support.
However I took the dive and switched to Linux rather than Windows 11, to a great extent prompted by people here reporting good experiences gaming on it (since I already have quite a lot of expertise in it and I mainly just use my PC for gaming) plus it’s part of a broader set of changes to avoid enshittification (such as replacing my TV-Box with a Mini-PC with Linux) I’m doing at home and am very happy with the result.
It’s less heavy than Windows, even booting faster and seems to have extended how long I can keep going before that computer is totally run to the ground, though for that it also helps that once I started upgrading by changing the OS, I also went and did a few partial upgrades of the hardware, like replacing my old CPU with an equally old one but twice as powerfull - which used to cost 200 bucks but now was 17 bucks second hand - a more powerful graphics card and a more modern SSD disk for the games partition (it’s actually a modern M.2 SATA on a 2.5 inch housing adaptor, and that’s as fast as SATA ever got and to get better than that you need a PCIx M.2) - basically I did the upgrades I could do on the cheap without changing motherboard and everything else that depends on it (like memory and a newer generation CPU) and which would still be compatible with the Windows 7 boot partition I still have around (though I haven’t actually been booting it). Since I went from Windows 7 to Linux rather than Windows 11, none of the hardware upgrades was wasted in just making up for the extra bloat on Windows 11 and the machine definitelly feels a lot more performant.
As for games, most just work, about 1/3 need extra tweaking to work well or work at all and only 1 or 2 so far I couldn’t get to work at all.
Curiously at least one game - Borderlands 2 from Steam - that didn’t work on Windows 7, works on Linux. Also I can now run games whose minimum Windows version is 10 which I couldn’t before.
Also since all non-Linux games are running on the Wine compatibility layer, Linux is actually better backwards compatible with older Windows and DOS than Windows itself, which is nice for Patient Gamer types like me.
I think that with Linux in it my PC is actually compatible with more games than it was with Windows 7.
I seriously think it’s one of my best decisions in years.
There’s a whole different angle to game fun which is exploring game mechanics and the complexity that emerges from their combinations and interaction with the game space and the behaviour of independent game entities.
For example (and highly simplified), in Terraria the player has to balance the location of resources, their search and extraction of them, the actual movement, location and needs of the game monsters and NPCs, and their own progression up the “research ladder” (only in Terraria the “research ladder” is implicit and based on which resources have you managed to get your hands on and what have you built with them).
Whilst some of the fun in that game is in exploring a procedurally generated world, the drive to do so and the main fun in the game is to solve the complex problems that emerge from the interaction of those things: you explore to find resources that let you make equipment that allows you to explore more dangerous or harder to reach places to find more complex resources to make more complex equipment and so on and meanwhile the more advanced equipment also lets you do no stuff (IMHO, just merelly “shovel +1 level” equipment improvements are nowhere as satisfying as getting access to new kinds of stuff that let you do new stuff).
Examine games like for example Factorio, Minecraft or Rimworld and you find the same kind of global game loop: do stuff to get stuff to be able do more difficult stuff to get more advanced stuff and so on and all the while the complexity of your choices increases because the combination of options you have goes up as, often, also does the complexity of the World you now have de facto access to.
The AAA world however went down the path of story-like games which have one core linear story (the main quest) and then a bunch of mini-stories (side quests) and were game progression comes from advancing the core story and gaining levels (which themselves are generally just the mathematical result of doing stuff and advancing the core store and doing side stories) that let you do the same things only better and maybe a few news things, ultimatelly to help story progression. Stories “officially” drive the player’s exploration (though some players also self driven to just explore just because of liking to explore) and it seems to be impossible to get good stories working well in procedurally generated worlds (as No Man’s Sky has proven, IMHO). There is often some amount of the same mechanics as I describe above for open world indie games, but they’re not the core of the game and what drives the player.
And yeah, if your game is story driven and you can’t procedurally generate the game space with good stories, you’re going to hit limits in the size of the thing, either on the size of the game space that has to be handcrafted to work well with the stories or in the amount of stories being insufficient for the game space leading to lots of boring game space that feels empty like it’s just filler.
There are quite a lot of ways of making an open world game with infinite replayability without requiring massive maps, but they’re not in the style AAA gaming has been going for in the past decade, they’re more things like Oxygen Not Included, Factorio, Minecraft or Battle Brothers were the game space is procedurally generated, the fun is in conquering the challenges of a map, and once you exhaust it you stop yet end up coming back months later and try a new game with a new map, from scratch, because it’s again fun and there’s no “I know this map” to spoil it.
The handmade game spaces with custom made “adventures” do manage to have better experiences than those games that rely on procedural generation and naturally emerging situations for providing gamers with experiences, but they’re mainly once of and rely on sheer size to remain entertaining for long.
Valve is a much, much bigger company than GoG, plus Valve’s Linux strategy is really a “have our own console on the cheap” strategy.
But yeah, GoG should be doing more for gaming on Linux, maybe not as much as Valve but proportionally so. At the moment they’re doing almost nothing at all: they have Linux offline installers available for games which do support Linux directly, but that’s it.
So whilst I find it unrealistic to expect that GoG should be contributing to gaming on Linux as much as Valve, I do agree they should be doing more.
PS: Mind you, I’m not trying to make the case that GoG is perfect and Steam is shit, I’m trying to make the case that open and flexible to use is better than closed and tightly integrated with a specific store, which is why I generally prefer GoG with their offline installers, as well as Lutris + Wine (quite independently of GoG) and would be happy enough even if Lutris had no GoG integration since long before moving my gaming rig to Linux I had the habit of downloading and using the offline installers and did not at all use GoG Galaxy.
If there’s one thing that 30 years of being a Software Engineer have taught me is that you want your system to be as decoupled as possible from any business, because even if they are nice at the moment that’s no guarantee that at a later date they won’t leverage people having their systems integrated with theirs to take advantage of their customers (the phenomenon of enshittification being a good example of that).
The point I’m making is that with its process Lutris + Wine are scaling up much faster to seamlessly make all sorts of Windows games Click & Play in Linux, than Steam can or even will try to (don’t expect Steam to get around to cover older games that aren’t successful AAA titles).
It’s the same old same old, open source software solution vs closed corporate software solution that happens in so many other domains: the open source one starts clunky and quirky and it will always tend towards the side of “giving users enough rope to hang themselves with” (too many option, many very powerful) whilst the closed corporate one will from the very start be slick and easier to use but very limited when it comes to what users can do to customize it or even fix it when it doesn’t work, but over time and if it manages to survive the open source one will be better and far more capable and flexible than the corporate one simply because contributions to it scale up with interest in it and number of users whilst that’s not so for the corporate one.
It’s what you see with for example Blender vs Adobe’s suit of 3D modelling programs or Linux vs Windows (if it weren’t for the well entrenched ecosystem of Windows-only applications, I doubt Windows would still be around).
That’s why I think something like Lutris + Wine are the future, not Proton integrated into the Store application of Steam.
Proton too just automates the work that somebody did in the form of install instructions, same as Lutris.
The difference is that those making the install scripts for Proton are paid for and you don’t get the option to fix them or make your own, which means that there are in fact fewer games with Steam install instructions (i.e. Steam Support) than games with Lutris install scripts.
Further, there are fewer things you can tweak in Proton and they’re all either changing the proton version or some badly documented text parameters that get fed to its command line, whilst Lutris actually has most such options in menus: the learning curve for just starting a game is lower in Steam that in Lutris when it works but the learning curve for fixing it when it does not work is lower in Lutris and sometimes you simply don’t have access to change what’s needed to fix it in Steam but you do in Lutris.
If you use Lutris with its GoG integration the experience is generally the same kind of Click & Play as Proton of Steam and whilst the rate of problems seems to still be a bit bigger in Lutris, surprisingly (at least for me) it’s not by much.
For me in Lutris having to go and install Microsoft components using Winetricks is generally only needed for some standalone installer executables, not when using GoG integration.
Steam is great when it works and a massive headache and pretty limited on what you can do when it doesn’t, whilst at least with GoG integration Lutris is great when it works and still a headache when it doesn’t but not as much as Steam and it gives you a lot more options to try and get it to work, plus the coverage of pre-made installer scripts in Lutris (which is what makes games “just work” in it) seems to be broader than in Steam, including covering older and more obscure titles, plus that coverage is probably growing faster because the scripts are user contributed rather than the work that can be done adding support being limited by how many people Valve (who are notorious for having very few employees for a company that size) hired to work on it.
Lutris has GoG integration and it’s exactly that same 2 step process if you use it (I believe it passes you through 3 screens of options were you invariably do nothing but click “Continue”, so strictly it’s 5 steps were 3 of the are just “Press Continue”)
The difference is that when it does NOT just work, it’s easier to figure out and there are more options to fix it with Lutris + Wine.
I even have some weird weird cases on Steam - like Borderlands 2 were Steam would often and randomly, before actually starting the game spend almost 1h doing shader conversions that if you stopped it the game would fail to start (the solution was to force an older Proton version and now you just get random downloads from the Internet that last a few minutes before the game starts).
IMHO, here too what one sees is the general design philosophy difference between open source software and corporate solutions - the former gives you tons of options and lots of ways to tune it so it looks more complicated to use and has a steeper learning curve but that also means when things go wrong you have a lot more ways to try to fix it, whilst the latter is click & play until things go wrong and then you have very little info and just a few things you can change to try and fix it.
Mind you, Lutris itself seems to be an attempt to also be click & play (hence why you generally get a steam-like experience if you use its GoG integration) but all the “buttons and knobs” are still there (those 3 screens of options that’s usually fine to just press “Continue” on that I mentioned above) just in case you want to muck about with them, making it look daunting to use.
I’ve been playing more GoG games with Lutris + Wine in Linux than Steam games with Proton and I even have one situation of a game were the copy I bought in Steam doesn’t work with Proton, but the pirated copy I downloaded to see if that would work runs absolutely fine with Lutris + Wine.
For me at least it’s actually easier to sort problems out with games when using Lutris + Wine than it is with Proton and I can even make sure all games I run from Lutris are wrapped in a “firejail” sandbox, which amongst other things blocks all network access, something I can’t do with Proton.
It’s a vendor-tied solution meant to keep you in the Steam ecosystem, so for all the great work they did in past getting it to have broad compatibility, the future is not Proton, it’s Wine.
The info is here and none of that “DRM” means you can’t in the future, after the servers are down, install the game from your copy of the offline installer and play it.
None of that is DRM in the sense we’re talking about here: the kind of mechanism that allows the game to be taken away from you or won’t let you install it or play it in single-player anymore when the publisher decides they don’t want to pay for servers anymore.
It is, none the less, a deviation from the No-DRM promise, IMHO.
Not in the sense we’re discussing it here, they don’t.
There’s a list of about 20 games said to have DRM in Gog and when you actually read the list rather than just it’s title it turns out none of them has what we would call DRM - any sort of phone-home validation or anti-piracy measure.
It’s mainly things games with add-on content that requires you use Gog Galaxy or register online, some that send analytics to a server and stuff like that.
Whilst it’s still nasty and still shouldn’t be happening, none of that makes the game unusable in the future after the servers are down if you still have the offline installer.
I have so far avoided that specific pit, but that’s because for maybe decades now and still whilst using Windows as my main I’ve avoid proprietary solutions (except for games) and went for Open Source ones instead, which has yielded the benefit that since I moved over to Linux for good a few months ago, I have yet to be faced with needing something I used to use in Windows and not finding a Linux native version.
I’m sure I’ll end up in the same kind of situation you describe.
By the way, have you tried “Bottles”? From what I’ve heard (but did not test myself yet) it might help there and it’s not specifically for games.