Technology

I have to disagree. Mint had far worse performance (basically unusable) than Pop OS for me. Not sure why, I had proper drivers in both cases... Just saying, installing steam is not all.

Nowadays I recommend Bazzite for gaming

The experience of installing and updating GPU drivers can be very different across different distros. Especially if you use secure boot. This was such a pain point for me on Tumbleweed that I just pinned my kernel.

I actually like what Steam did for Linux gaming in general, but in the end it is slowly becoming a crutch. Why should I spin up the Steam client (that is neither fast nor easy on resources, too) every time I want to play a non-steam game?

Again... it's nice what Valve is doing in general and that most of the stuff is open source and thus can be back ported to Wine.

I however find it concerning that the number of people doing so seems to be constantly decreasing. And I don't actually understand why the majority of gamers -people that are insanely obsessed with very small FPS or other perfomance increases sometimes- seems to be content with using Steam as the one-size-fits-all solution for games. Just simple Wine Staging can often match the performance for older games, for all games once you start backporting some patches and fixes developed for Proton. And yet the contributors seem to get less by the day and a lot of projects pre-compiling patched Wine versions are vanishing for a lack of interest.

In short: I don't get that voluntary lock-in to Steam for very little convenience of having a fancy interface for starting your games.

I largely agree with ya. I bet someone can cook up some edge cases where the newer kernel might matter. I like that this article lays out how to setup the GPU. But I know Ubuntu has a nice gui for installing proprietary drivers.