Karyoplasma

There’s also the point that game quality has gone down significantly. If I were to build a new rig which would cost me an arm and a leg, I would still just play games that my current PC can already run anyway. I don’t wanna play the newest CoD-slop or some tech-demo with MTX-shop disguised as a game. The newest games I really enjoyed were Monster Sanctuary (Unity-based monster collector metroidvania-like) and Balatro (no introduction necessary). A toaster can run these.

My “gaming rig” (more like toaster - it’s not good and I am a poor loser) still runs Win7. Last defensible Windows version.

Proton is a big deal for the change. Think back 5 years ago and switching to Linux was much less approachable because you needed to be an enthusiast to get your games running. Nowadays, you just click download on the Linux Steam client and >90% of the time, it’ll just work.