
Google and apple certainly take a cut. Bigger than patreon and onlyfans btw.

It's arch KDE under the hood, as long as a terminal is accessible and you have root privileges you could probably run an airplane on it if you'd like. The relevant point is the default setting, the thing that nobody changes and why google's paying apple 18 billion per year.

Doesn't it boot straight into steam big picture? That alone should be a deterrent to most people wanting to run it as a desktop OS.

The cost is actually negative given that they get to pre-install whatever software they want into it.

Microsoft is actually the least problematic of the console racket (Sony, Nintendo and MS), games release simultaneously to pc and they offer cross compatibility. Maybe the EU will address it eventually, but i guess mobile takes precedent given that everyone has a cell phone.

the people who provoked Nintendo.
This is my problem with your argument, you're saying that because of piracy they're entitled to crack down on emulation. Piracy is just a pretext they're using here. Emulation is legal and yet they're doing everything in their power to stop it from happening, this has nothing to do with piracy.

What if he had preordered the game?

Not only that, but you're also harming the console modding community by incentivizing the publisher to go after homebrew developers and emulator developers. It wasn't a coincidence that shortly after some asshat streamed an unreleased Zelda game being played on Yuzu, Nintendo decided to finally come down on the emulator with an iron fist.
There's plenty of ways to stop piracy, Nintendo just doesn't want you to play outside their walled garden. They could choose to facilitate emulation and let you buy their games from emulators and prevent piracy while not hindering emulation. They could choose to port their games to other platforms. But no, they crack down on emulation because it hurts their bottom line if people don't have to buy a switch - or whatever to play their games. Fuck Nintendo.

There's always plenty of good reasons to postpone something and only one to do it now.

Getting mods working for games
Yeah mods can be quite troublesome.
If you use a hard drive other than your os install drive then you need to go to the steam website to get the installer and not use the one in the built in app store.
Sounds like a steam problem.
Non gaming related I've had numerous issues trying to manage permissions for my hard drives
Eh, i remember mounting being a bit troublesome a few years back, but current GNOME should take of that for you with very little input on your end. This brings us to PopOS 22 which is starting to get really old at this point, I'd consider moving away to something that's not left abandoned while they finish up Cosmic.

Setting up dual boot takes like an hour. But yeah, there's no rush to it, linux will still be there tomorrow. I don't recommend buying a new pc and changing OS at the same time though. You don't want to test your new hardware on a system you're not familiar with.

I was thinking of doing that once I get my new pc.
Why wait? Hard drives don't have compatibility issues, and you can always just use clonezilla to copy and paste the system to a new NVME SSD later on if you like.
As for the VM it'd probably be better the other way around, gaming on VMs is not that great an experience and gpu passthrough is complicated to setup.

Games having access to everything i do on my pc is sheer lunacy. Let the devs sanitize their fucking inputs and not give client information the player shouldn't have access to. Anti cheat has always been an arms race, nothing, and that does include your kernel anti cheat, will ever completely stop cheaters.

Dual boot is always a thing, it doesn't have to be one or the other.

So there you have it, you either stop playing all multiplayer games (not even just competitive ones!) entirely
There's plenty of multiplayer games that run just fine on linux. Including FPS games with perfectly functional anti cheat, it's just a select few which are unfortunately very popular that actively block linux. This is the part where you put your money where your mouth is and support the games that support the system you want to game on.

Yeah i was gonna mention xcom initially but i doubt stuff like party deaths will be a thing here. This game looks like it's gonna feature full on companions, and the controls look pretty much exactly like bg3.

Those are some hot 10 seconds of footage. Looks like bg3's combat with some tactical cover.

I always wonder about the people who drop off just before finishing the game.
They probably don't want the game to end, there's a certain finality that comes with an ending. I've had this happen to me for a few games and books but i usually power through.

sometimes reviewers only play the first few parts.
Not just the reviewers unfortunately, games shed players at every step, it's why most games are front-loaded and fall off the further you get into them.