I’ve tinkered plenty even when using Windows haha. I even have a Windows 98 and Windows XP virtual machine for some old things, but everything I care about seems to have a modern HD release, a userpatch or can be hooked with dxwnd, so I don’t use them anymore at the moment.
But yeah probably the long term solution is Linux. Personally I wouldn’t run Windows 7 anymore. The unfixed CVE list has become quite long. I just went checking for the above titles out of principle, because I don’t like this conflation of PC gaming with only Steam.
I still haven’t made the jump to gaming on Linux, unfortunately. Although I’ve been running a dual boot for the last 8 years or so, because I used Linux for my studies, use it for my work, and for hosting my game servers on a second computer, so I would be in a prime position… but so far I have just gone the way of least resistance, which is still Windows 10 at the moment.
But I have a deadline now: October 2025. Just need to figure out the best distro, I don’t think I’ll use my existing Fedora KDE install for this. Maybe Arch, or one of these new immutable distros, that might be neat for when different games require different versions of libraries.
The title of that article is kind of weird. It’s just wrong to claim they are dead for gaming because of a lack of steam.
Anyone can just get Witcher 3, Rise of the Tomb Raider, Stardew Valley, or Anno 2070 from GoG and for each of them you can game for another 50 hours without needing steam. Or get Minecraft from their page directly and play for 100 hours. This is all without going to any retro titles.