I use both Steam with Proton (for Steam store games) and Lutris with Wine (for the rest, mainly GOG) and the rate of one-click-setup success in both is about the same (maybe slightly better for Steam), with Lutris with Wine being more easy to tweak for solving the problems for those games that won’t just directly run, plus Lutris lets me do way much more configuration customizing, so for example all my games under Lutris run sandboxed with networking disabled by default.

Granted, I am a Techie so I can more easilly figure out how to tweak all those configuration options and how to track launch problems in the logs.

Maybe Steam with Proton has a slight advantage for non-Techies (or Techies who just don’t have the patience to even try to tweak things when a game won’t run and just give up on it and move on), but it’s not really that amazing - I get the impression it’s more of a problem of misinformation (people hear about Steam and Proton and how it’s all great, so try it and stick with it, but they don’t hear enough about Lutris and the Heroic Launcher so end up not even trying either of them): it looks a lot to me like an instance of the usual “open source vs commercial software” marketing problem.

Mind you, without Lutris (or, as others mentioned, the Heroic Launcher which is similar) with all the nice install scripts properly configuring Wine for the specific game being installed, trying to game on Linux by directly configuring Wine (+DXVK) would be as an experience bad as gaming on Linux was a decade ago.

PS: That said, using the GOG client on Linux is a hassle and best avoided. both Lutris and Heroic integrate with GOG, listing the games in your account and seamlessly downloading the installers when you chose to install a game.

Robes for frogs, apparently.

I’m not normalising wasted resources, but 8 GB of RAM was a basic minimum standard to do anything on a computer 10 years ago… Perhaps even more.

Unless you’re running a very, and I mean a VERY, cut-down operation system for none-intensive tasks, there is no way 4 GB of RAM is useful for anything.

Are you still on a dual core CPU too?

Well GOG is just the acronym for Good Old Games no ?

My own experience of problems with the “Steam way” is wanting to install and run a new game whilst offline (for example, when I moved houses and was waiting to get landline Internet running, whilst mobile Interned was too slow or expensive to download anything but the tinyiest of games, all the while my external HD with a collection of GOG offline installers gave me plenty of options) and installing games in machines with older versions of Windows because the Steam Application doesn’t support those old OS versions anymore (plus, in all honesty, you definitelly don’t want to to connect such machines to the Internet for security reasons).

Further, as I said in a different post, I can run my GOG games through Lutris by default sandboxed with networking disabled, but I can’t do that in Steam.

More in general, as a Techie since the 90s I’ve long been very aware (and averse) to the dangers of having software or data which is supposedly yours yet is de facto under direct control of an external 3rd party for whom you’re nothing (i.e. not a mate you lent a CD to, but a big company with a massive Legal budget controlling your access to it using phone-home validation), so out of principle I heavilly favor sellers who do not try and retain control of what I bought from them. Same reason I didn’t like “phone home” or “dependent on external servers” hardware or DRM-wrapped books or music, well before the recent wave of enshittification and increase in problems like digital books taken away from people because of some licensing dispute (or even their accounts just being terminated) or hardware bricked because the servers were switched off.

Whilst it might seem like an old-fashioned sense of ownership, that posture has saved me from pretty much all the effects of the enshittification wave.

From all that I wrote, somebody having that take is the equivalent for metaphors of being a Grammar Nazi.

If they do it for others, like in film, tv, or theater, they’re also called costume designers.

Always seemed like a neat career!

What was the purpose of you writting as the very first sentence of your post:

Steam doesn’t enforce the use of its DRM (which is super easy to bypass anyway but that’s a side note).

If not to tell us that Steam also sells DRM-free games?

If Steam also sells DRM-free games (even if alongside games with DRM) then de facto Steam is a seller of DRM-free games.

Being a “seller of” doesn’t mean just selling that and nothing else.

I’d love to play DRM games but I also love DRM free operating systems and apparently both at once is too much for the transphobes at CDPR to handle

It’s like halloween all year round, and I am here. For. It!

Well no, your metaphor is based on the premise that copy and paste is difficult. You can compare it to something ridiculous, but it doesn’t change that copying and pasting something is something actual children master.

The purpose was to tell you exactly what I stated - that Steam does not enforce the use of DRM and nothing more.

You’re the one that wants to extrapolate that statement to mean much more than it does.

The point you missed is that the use of DRM is on the publisher/developer and not Steam itself.

GOG has DRM, they call it Galaxy.

It’s not a DRM, it is just a launcher.

Am I crazy to demand another store for PC gaming ?

But this time it should be a lovechild of steam & GOG but FOSS like Itch.io

Don’t you people think us gamers deserve better stores ?

It’s ironic that a platform hell bent on providing DMR-free games and preserving them doesn’t seem interested in supporting the one OS in-line with their views.

Nor public movements to do with it either. They’re certainly an interesting company…

Yes, but no. That’s the whole point of the rebranding. You will not find the words “Good Old Games” anywhere in their official materials when referring to themselves. They are now “just” GOG.

They still use “good old game” as a tag for some of the games they sell. But they will never utter those words when referring to themselves in any capacity.

Is it silly? Maybe. But it’s a valid marketing strategy. How effective is it? I don’t know. Maybe ask BP.

You pointed out that Steam sells games without DRM.

I pointed out that for the customer that’s just a side effect of Steam selling games, since the absence of DRM is not pitched as a feature or even listed by the Steam store.

It seems to me that my point just adds to your point to make a more complete picture that better informs readers.

Are not both our points true?

Yeah I searched on their website for a bit and did indeed not find any mention of the old name.