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Even older dGPUs like the R9 270/270X or 280/280X, hell, even the R9 290/290X or 390/390X (R9 390/390X is just a faster 290/290X which ships with 8GB VRAM as standard issue), while admittedly pushing it a little, will also work fine for most indie titles and even truly ancient (as in DX9-era and earlier, think stuff like Silent Hill 2 which launched in 2002 for the PC) AAA stuff, you’ll just need to manually enable a compatibility toggle for GCN1 or GCN2 cards to work with AMDGPU in DIY distros like Arch or Gentoo while last time I thought some prebuilt distros like Fedora enabled it by default.

These are the compatibility toggles you’ll need to set in kernel parameters for GCN1 and GCN2 cards to work with AMDGPU if they’re not set already. GCN3 and newer natively supports AMDGPU without needing said toggles.

amdgpu.si_support=1 amdgpu.cik_support=1

So you’re suggesting MS will somehow block non-Windows OSes from installing, even on hardware like loose mainboards for building your own PC with, or even on barebones mini PC kits or certain laptop SKUs, which don’t ship with an OS installed to begin with and expect the user to install it themselves? I mean, unless something extreme happens like changing the entire PC platform to be like the current Macs, that won’t be feasible.

Also, doing that would kill the Steam Deck which I doubt Valve would take sitting down.

Good luck locking loose mainboards sold for the DIY market, which don’t come with anything installed by default, to a given OS, the only way that could maybe work is forcing the OS in ROM.

Another way would be to discontinue the socketed desktop form factors and replace them all with mini PCs that are as locked down as the current Macs.

Good thing PCs aren’t locked into Windows.

I’ve been happily running the mesa-dev stack (mesa-tkg-git from the chaotic-aur repo) both on semi-current hardware (an RX 6600 that’s sidelined by a bad fan atm) and somewhat older hardware (the Vega 56 I’m using as a backup because it’s my second best card after the RX 6600) for a while now so I don’t know what you’re doing.

Even for Doom3, both vanilla and BFG, and RTCW, Steam versions included, Lutris allows you to install native community ports for those pretty easily too.

I’d recommend Lutris over Heroic both because it runs locally where Heroic is Electron, and because Lutris allows community-based native Linux ports for games where applicable, eg. for Ultima VII: The Black Gate + The Forge of Virtue, Lutris gives you the option of installing that game with Exult instead of DOSbox, for Tomb Raider and Tomb Raider II, you have the option to install those with OpenLara, for Doom 1 and 2, you have the option to install those with ZDoom, for Little Big Adventure, you can install that with the ScummVM runner, etc.

Also, at least for DOS games where you don’t have the option to install a community-based modern port, you can use native DOSbox as a runner instead of Windows DOSbox as well through Lutris.

Oh, and one more bonus particularly for GOG games in Lutris’ favor over Heroic, is Lutris uses the offline installers so that if anything ever goes wrong with any given GOG game, you can just reinstall from the offline installer where Heroic operates more like GOG Galaxy or Steam in that it’s always downloaded from scratch.

The Goanna browsers will run on pretty low-spec hardware, and there’s also h.264ify for sites like YT, unless Google blocked YT from loading on Goanna browsers.

Puppy would fly on there, or even DSL 2024. Heck, both those distros would fly even on a Pentium 4 of all things.

Assuming it’s not completely useless for this purpose, you could load FreeDOS on it and use it for playing older PC games.

MS-DOS 6.22 would be sub-optimal as it was designed with 486-era and older hardware in mind and since it doesn’t support FAT32 and only supports FAT16, you’re limited to 2GB partitions, while FreeDOS is actually designed with newer hardware like this in mind and supports FAT32 and thus larger drives.

Fooyin’s great so far as a Foobar2k alternative.

Based on how increasingly user-hostile Windows has been getting lately, I don’t trust it outside of a VM or outside of a second system I don’t care about if I want or need to run it baremetal for some reason, and that includes LTSC.

At least LTSC for now seems to be spared from MS’ worst anti-user atrocities, but there’s nothing saying those SKUs won’t get screwed somehow at some point down the line.