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

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.

On the joke, define “sane”. 😬

On a serious note, I think there are valid reasons to have several VMs other than “I was bored”. In my case, for example, I have a total of 7 VMs, where 2 are miscellaneous systems to test things out, 2 are for stuff that I can’t normally run on Linux, 2 are offline VMs for language dictionaries, and 1 is a BlissOS VM with Google programs in case I can’t/don’t want to use my phone.

As much as GOG/CD Projekt have more than their fair share of problems, usually their versions of games work, can be preserved, don’t require as much bloat, launchers included, and usually don’t require 3rd party validation. And like others said, besides Wine and related, and installing through Steam as external games, you can also install stuff very easily through Heroic and the sort. So I’d say it’s the better option indeed.

Besides Flatpak, Heroic also has an official AppImage version, if the OP wants to have an even more portable program.

To my knowledge, besides the newest updates not necessarily being as stable, but also, other softwares that interact with it would need time to adapt themselves to be sure they’re as compatible as they were before. In a situation of constant updates, other software would always be on a situation of catching up, whereas updates that take a bit longer to land allow “for the dust to set down”.

About gaming, from my personal experience, it’s overall pretty straight forward. When issues happen, you just got to have patience to read through logs and search up on Google or similar any suspicious parts of the log. Worst part is usually DRM/anticheat, but from what I can gather, usually pretty isolated cases are problematic due to compatibility, usually requiring the devs to go out of their ways to make the DRM incompatible.

As for the distros question, perhaps Linux Mint? It trades off bleeding edge updates for the sake of stability. Just avoid the Debian-based variant of Mint for now as it’s still in beta.

Look for games that are sold DRM free. Those can’t be taken from you by devs or the store after backed up. And usually devs and/or stores that deliberately sell such games also make it clear people can keep their games.

From the instances I used, it seems to be a mixed bag. Some even allowed for the user to block domains unrelated to the fediverse.

Was commenting more generally, in case there’s someone against Facebook in instances that don’t block them.

And about lemm.ee, although the guy running it is strongly against defederation, I guess Facebook the company is too much even for him. "<.<

Blocking everyone and every community you see from Facebook’s new parasite social media could be good, me thinks.

Both tools can be used from the terminal like most Linux programs, which should also give you better control during troubleshooting and also in the rarer cases of having to set up/run some more temperamental games. There are also graphical programs that handle Wine/Proton in a more friendly way, such as Heroic Launcher, Lutris and, specifically for Proton, Steam itself.

Unfamiliar with it, but in the regard of instances going down, specially after my previous main instance died with no signs of returning (again), if you find any interesting posts even on instances seemingly stable, I think it is a good idea to back up those pages. Personally, I would propose methods like Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine and its alternatives like Archive Today, the print to PDF option from browsers, and/or saving a given page as a MHTML bundle.

There are cases where AppImages aren’t viable indeed, like with programs that require ring 0 access. But limitations exist for all formats, so perhaps another good alternative is having multiple versions of a given program, like downloading the equivalent deb package through apt while also keeping the appimage version. It would bloat the storage for a potential automated configuration, but it should help with ensuring compatibility.

One thing I like to have with me is the AppImage version of programs when possible, since they usually work out of the box. Also helps ensuring I don’t depend on the availability of whatever package manager the system uses.