Would love a new Steam Machine and could actually be good this time. Proton didn’t exist when they released the original Steam Machines which limited you to linux ports of games. I had bought two but wiped & did clean installs of Windows 7 so we could play all the games wanted to.
Before Proton, gaming on linux relied on native ports or WINE. Native ports were rare & not always better. WINE took some learning to make work well but I dunno, never got any good at it.
The OS was also very limited with focus on Linux ports of games which there were not very many at the time. Proton wasn’t a thing yet. I bought two of them, one for myself and one for my brother. I tested it out & it was neat but wiped both to do clean installs of Windows 7 so could play the games we wanted.
For old monitors breaking or acting weird a lot of times it’s capacitors going bad & popping. I love looking around at the insides of tech things that stopped working right to try seeing why & maybe fixing them so just curious what could be causing it :)