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As I mentioned in my first post, it's been over a decade since I last seriously partook in the hobby. And my first task starting up again was understanding the state of play compared to when I was teenager. And boy, have things changed.

Then

The first and most obvious change was that of the models. Back when I was first playing, there were two main types – plastic and metal.

The plastic models from back in the day were basic but serviceable. They were a light grey colour, fairly sparsely packed onto the sprue, with fairly noticeable mold lines that needed to be worked on pretty aggressively to get looking decent. They could sometimes be a little bit finicky to put together, and at times the mold itself was not the best – little bits of “void” filled with plastic that weren't really any part of the model itself, so you needed to work out how to properly paint them.

Then there were the metal models. These were an... interesting... experience to say the least. Poor quality sculpts, excessive flash. Sometimes the mold wasn't completely filled, so there were just crap bits that you just needed to work out what to do with (mmm green stuff). They also really heavy and sometimes unbalanced. Which could mean if you weren't expecting the weight differential between the plastic and metal models, you could knock them over (occasionally off the table!)

The metal models were mostly small blisters of 1-2 models, but there were also full unit boxes made entirely of metal, too – I believe the Space Marines Terminator squad boxes were still metal when I started playing.

Most “character” models at the time were metal – though toward the end of my time collecting a few plastic kits started to come out with lots of different wargear, weapons and even armour/head choices – a Space Marine Captain kit was one of the first of this design I believe – perhaps early 4th edition?

There was also Forgeworld – resin, high quality models which specialised in exotic, high points models like Titans and custom/exclusive Space Marine chapters and Guard regiments and the like.

Now

First thing I noticed opening up my Necrons Combat Patrol box was that the plastic is a much darker grey than I remember the old plastic being. My understanding is that somewhere around the early 2010s Games Workshop completely changed the composition of their plastic which has apparently allowed much more detail in the sculpts – seems like that's very much the case having a look through the sprues. The Necron Overlord model in particular is absolutely gorgeous.

Metal models are entirely gone (to my knowledge). Almost all models, from troop choices all the way through to unique models like the Primarchs and the like are supplied as multi-part plastic kits with plenty of extra parts and options, allowing players to fairly easily customise their army.

Forgeworld is gone, having been long absorbed back into the Warhammer brand. The models are still largely there – being branded mostly as 15+ models that ship exclusively from the UK (whereas most other models are available from the local warehouse or store where one exists). But the range is considerably smaller than it used to be – for example the Elysian Drop Troop Imperial Guard regiment has been out of print for many years, as have many of the customisation kits.

The composition of some of the kits seems to have changed – with some being “snap fit”-type models that don't strictly require glue to assemble – but I'm not sure if this is on a case-by-case basis for different kits or if it's a gradual conversion occurring as new Codices/kits are released.

The sprues themselves seem to be a bit more densely packed than previously – not sure if this is a cost-cutting measure or something else. I was surprised to see that a 10 model Necron Warrior squad used only a single sprue, even with different head and weapon options!

The paints are a little different as well. I believe in the early 2010s (or maybe late 2000s) Games Workshop changed its paint supplier and over time has greatly expanded the paint range with different types for different use cases. I think previously there was just paint (and maybe there were also separate washes?) but now there's Base, Contrast, Layer, Shade, Dry and more, each with different uses.

I'm really excited by the Technical paints in particular – they look like they give really cool options for nice bases – whereas previously unless you wanted to do a significant amount of work you pretty much just needed to go with PVA glue and old-school modelling flock.

Next Steps!

Next I'll talk about getting myself set up for the hobby, choosing supplies, tools and talk about how the use of these tools has changed over time as well!

As we did last year, we've sat down and considered what we want to achieve over the last twelve months. 2025 was a year we achieved a lot, and want to keep the momentum going as we move into 2026.

The scope of this year's strategy is probably a fair bit smaller than what we aimed for last year – and that's okay. We don't have big ideas on expanding and adding new services, though this may happen along the way. Instead, this year we'll be focusing on governance.

The biggest piece of work we'll be working on this year is creating Fediverse.Games as an independent, incorporated association in NSW, Australia. Presently, all services, hardware and the like is owned directly by me (Bob Dendry) – which is fine, but means that the entity that is Fediverse.Games is tied directly to my person. By separating Fediverse.Games from myself, we can implement better governance and ensure money coming in from our users as donations can only be used for the purposes of furthering our community's goals.

There's a number of steps that are required to achieve this goal. There's a lot of clerical work including selecting Directors, drafting constitutions, member schedules and the like, which is likely to take some time to draft and review. Once this work is complete and approved by the regulating body, I will start to take steps to transfer physical resources (servers, drives) and the like over to the association as donations. There will still be some ownership crossover remaining – which we'll discuss along the way, but this will be transparently handled.

What is an Incorporated Association?

In simple terms, being an incorporated association means (my paraphrasing):

• Our small, not-for-profit entity can operate as a separate legal entity to me and anyone else who helps with our day-to-day running.
• We cannot provide assets or profits to enrich members (including myself)
• Management Committee members are protected from personal liability provided they act in good faith.
• There are governance requirements, including financial reporting, keeping accurate minutes and holding Annual General Meetings.

This isn't an exhaustive list. You can find more details on the NSW Government website

Membership

You can have your say and contribute to the ongoing running of our services by becoming a member. The structure of membership was something that we had to consider closely, as there are requirements under incorporated association rules we must meet. As such, we will offer two main classes of memberships, each with different perks and responsibilities:

• Full Voting Members: Full Voting Members are elligible to vote in general meetings, be part of the management committee and are able to assist with the day-to-day running of the organisation. The key sticking point with this class of membership is that we are legally required to gather voting members' real names and contact details – and legally are required to provide a list of member names to other full members of the organisation. I know for a lot of people this will be a sticking point, and I absolutely understand why this is the case. That is why we've provided the below member class:
• Associate Member: Associate Members are not elligible to vote in general meetings or be part of the management committee. Instead, they are able to financially support the association and will receive perks for doing so (note: membership fees are not a payment for service). We are required to collect the names of our Associate Members, however a pseudonym (like you use for your Mastodon or Peertube account) is absolutely acceptable. There will be different tiers of Associate Member, which will have different perks associated.

The membership fees and benefits schedule will be provided in due course, prior to our registration as an incorporated association.

What Do All These Changes Mean For You?

From an operational point of view? Nothing.

More broadly, becoming an association places an onus on us to utilise donated money purely to meet its objectives. We're already doing this, but formalising this requirement will hold us better to account.

Questions?

Reach out to me on Mastodon if you want to chat more or get involved.

I first experienced the Games Workshop back in the early-to-mid 2000s. My memory's a little hazy, but if I'm recalling correctly my aunt and uncle were in town in Newcastle and I was dragged to lunch or something similar on the Hunter Street Mall. On a whim, I asked my dad if we could go into the Games Workshop store – the Newcastle Warhammer store is still in the same location 20+ years later, despite it already being in pretty terrible condition the first time I set foot in it.

So in I walked, and was greeted by the staff there. As opposed to how many Warhammer stores run today (one employee, outside of major shopping malls in a lot of cases), GW stores of the 2000s had a number of employees and were even sometimes in major shopping centre chains. I digress a little, but the more plentiful employees meant there was almost always someone on hand to help out the clueless tween who'd just turned up. For some reason, I decided that I'd paint a Warhammer Fantasy Battle (rip) model – an Orc, but learnt to play 40k instead. It was way back in 3rd edition at the time, so my introductory game was Space Marines vs Dark Eldar (now Drukhari).

As with many children coming into 40k, I was drawn to the Marines, and most of my early years playing the game involved Marines – first with a homebrew, white and red chapter I called the “White Tyrants” (hmm... thinking back now, that wasn't the most ideal name for a chapter I could have thought of. After working on the Tyrants for a while, I realised that white is really hard to paint well when you have absolutely zero artistic talent. So I scoured the internet, White Dwarf and just about every other resource I could get my hands on until I found my next chapter: the Dark Angels.

The Dark Angels had something cool and mysterious about them. The Deathwing paint scheme is also super cool (and slightly easier to paint compared to white). And I kicked on with them for a good few years, building up an army that probably topped out at about 2,500 points in size. But over the years other interests caught my attention, I struggled finding people my age and play with, and I stopped playing, painting and collecting. I always maintained interest in the hobby and the universe, and I even had another few attempts at starting up again (notably with Astra Militarum and T'au armies) but I never really got anywhere with those attempts.

Over the last couple of years in particular I've been really considering giving the hobby a red hot go again. By chance, I was hanging with some friends of friends about a month ago when I overheard them talking about building their armies. I had no idea I even knew anyone who collected, and the knowledge that there were a few people fairly close by that did (including one that had fairly recently started) gave me that little push to get started at the hobby again.

So I embarked on the new journey in earnest. But all my old paints and models were long gone, I hadn't played in 5 or 6 editions, and I didn't even know what army I wanted to collect. The Games Workshop landscape has changed markedly over the 10+ years since I played. So I had a bit of exploring and learning to do.

As we come to the end of 2025, I thought it'd be a good idea to revisit our progress over the last twelve months, how we tracked against our goals in our 2025 strategy, and where we'll be looking to take our 2026 strategy.

Overall, I'm reasonably happy with how we've gone through the year. There's been some periods of poor reliability which impacted all of our services to some degree, but it has especially impacted our Peertube instance and users uploading videos to it.

Stability Issues Through the Year

There's been two broad reasons for this, which I'll briefly cover:

• Hardware Reliability: at the start of the year, our services were running on primarily consumer-grade hardware, with a few enterprise-grade additions. We faced a number of issues with the consumer grade hardware, including drive corruptions and power supply failures.

As a result of this we've put considerable effort into getting enterprise-grade hardware into crucial areas, such as our control plane. We're also gradually moving from consumer-grade drives to enterprise-grade drives with full PLP – this makes data safer in a power loss situation and also increases the performance of our Ceph cluster.

• Edge Proxy: since Day 1 we've run a proxy in front of our services – both to shield our origin from malicious traffic and to help with caching static assets not in our object buckets.

We struggled to size and configure it correctly, and over the last 12 months made numerous configuration changes to try to maximise performance while maintaining all core functionality.

At the end of the day, our original setup just wasn't fit for purpose. After a long search and plenty of exploration, we finally found what we were after in BunnyCDN (Affiliate Link). We now run a distributed, containerised edge proxy which has significantly improved response times by getting the majority of our static assets closer to users.

There were challenges getting upload functionality just right, but we're looking pretty good now.

Our 2025 Strategy

At the beginning of the year, I set out a number of goals we'd work toward achieving throughout the year. I intentionally went big with these goals, and didn't have an expectation that they'd be completely fulfilled. Overall though I feel we've performed well.

Reliability and Resilience

We've made big steps throughout the year toward improving the reliability and resilience of our systems, implementing automated monitoring and alerting of downtime. We made further steps in the last couple of months to further granulate the monitoring to sub-components of some of our services – and we'll continue to investigate how to best implement new monitoring on some of our pain point endpoints, such as Peertube uploads.

We've also kicked on with our goals of uplifting the technology across the cluster, which culminated in us replacing our control plane nodes a few months back – doing so has significantly improved control plane operation performance, and we've been able to redeploy the old control plane nodes as low power data plane nodes to assist with less mission-sensitive workloads.

Upgrading our data storage kicks on too – we're continuing to move from consumer- to enterprise-grade SSDs and HDDs, a process we're optimistic will be completed in 2026.

One part of this goal where we achieved less than I'd have hoped was our goal to automate all of our maintenance processes in 2025. We did have some early success with a PoC for an automated maintenance model, but needed to put this on a backburner as we combated hardware and reliability issues through the second half of the year.

Service Expansion & Improvement

The delivery of this aspect of our strategy didn't quite align with what was planned – and that's okay.

We went live with Peertube back in April, and it's been our most successful service by far.

We also launched this WriteFreely instance, and the Fediverse.Games Magazine.

We had Community Game Servers and a Federated Identity platform on the cards during the year, however no real progress was made toward implementing either of these, and at this stage I don't see any real demand for either of these. They'll probably not be part of our 2026 strategy, but there's always the possibility we could introduce them during the year if there's a need or desire.

Financial Security & Sustainability

There's never been an urgent need for this as I can comfortably finance all our operations, but it was good to get our donation platforms up and running, and see our first donations come through. For those who contributed through the year – thank you!

I definitely want to get us established as a registered legal entity (potentially a not-for-profit) during this year, but there are significant amounts of work and not-insignificant amounts of money required to make this happen – so we'll see.

Moving Forward in 2026

2025's been a tough year. Hate permeates pretty much every facet of our society. World leaders appear intent on putting civil rights and science back decades at the minimum. People are struggling financially, physically, emotionally.

I want to foster a community where everyone is welcome, and intolerance is not tolerated. And I hope I've demonstrated that commitment personally as well.

I haven't considered what our 2026 strategy will look like at this stage. However it's unlikely there will be many major changes to our services – the focus is likely to be on continuing service improvement and optimisation, as well as giving back to the community and to the projects that have helped us along the way.

Hope everyone has an enjoyable holiday season, and Merry Christmas to those who celebrate!

Bob Dendry

If you've been using our services over the last couple of weeks, you're certain to have noticed a noticeable dropoff in our reliability. In particular, while there's been some small periods of general unavailability for other reasons such as network instability (which we're currently working with our network provider on), the worrying outages have related to repeated partial outages of upload functionality that were not detected by our healthcheck stack, which primarily looks at availability of the service as a whole.

There's some background to all of this. I've been working hard to make changes to some of our underlying tech that sits upstream of our main cluster, both for resilience and performance but also to decrease our cost base. We've been using BunnyCDN (affiliate link) to do this.

And to be clear, it's not Bunny's service that is causing the errors. It's that the changes being made require configuration in our cluster to support, and there have been some challenges in setting this up. This is both due to accumulated tech debt, previous misconfigurations, and in some cases just a lack of skill in configuring certain components, particularly Kubernetes Container Network Interfaces.

But it's not all bad news. The use of keepalive connection pooling, reconfiguring flows to reduce overhead on uploads, and the tweaking of resource allocation across our services has lead to a significant increase in upload throughput and response times, both of which are really important to our continued growth and the success of our platforms.

The main issue that has been plaguing us over the last week or so has been intermittent failures of inter-service connectivity between Mastodon, Peertube and our object storage. This has recurred a number of times despite different steps being made to attempt to resolve it. For Peertube – this primarily impacts uploads. For Mastodon, it impacts both uploads and the caching of remote images, such as avatars and attachments to posts.

The root cause of this appears to have been some funky caching going on of some of the virtual IPs we use for load balancing purposes in our cluster. We made some changes to our load balancing algorithm to improve performance. These changes failed, and were rolled back. For the large part the rollback was successful, however some iptables or similar changes appear to have persisted somewhere, causing the intermittent failure.

With this is now (hopefully) more fully resolved, our attention turns to how best to prevent this from happening in the future. I'm currently working on a suite of tools to periodically test the functionality of uploads on our services – not just that landing pages load correctly, but that uploads are successfully hitting our backend and loading to object storage.

This will take some time to fully develop, test and deploy. In the meantime I'm going to be uplifting our log monitoring to more quickly detect and alert to backend failures.

This isn't the post I was hoping to make – I was hoping to talk about the success we've had in using Bunny to reduce our cost base while increasing service performance. That post will come in the future, but I wanted to take the time to talk through our struggles over the last few weeks to keep you all informed on our progress against these challenges.

We wanted to share an update with you all about the use of private and unlisted videos on our platform.

We're coming up on six months since we first launched the instance. It's been far more successful popular than I could ever imagine. We have (as of the time of writing) 94 members and 181 videos utilising over 500GB of our on-premises data storage.

The spirit of this platform is to provide open, inclusive space to share video content, whether that be video, tech, personal stuff and anything and everything in between.

Unfortunately, we have seen a number of accounts being created for seemingly the sole purpose of hosting private videos for business purposes. This is not in the spirit of this platform, and we will be amending our terms of service around the fair use of private and unlisted videos.

I want to clarify that it is not the purpose of this policy to restrict the use of private and unlisted videos for channels that legitimately exist within and interact with the community at large. It is to prevent the use of our precious, finite resources on accounts that make no contribution to the community at all.

What Can You Do Under the Fair Use Policy?

Under the policy, you will be able to do the following:

• Share small pieces of private content to a very small audience. Bear in mind that the moderation team has full access to all videos on the platform, including private and unlisted videos.
• Provide “early access” to public videos for your paid subscribers on another platform (provided they become public a later date).
• Where the majority of your content is public, provide limited private or unlisted content for any other reason.

What Can't You Do Under the Fair Use Policy?

Under the policy, you will not be able to do the following:

• Upload large volumes of private and/or unlisted videos without any public content on a channel, or where public content makes up a small minority of your overall content volumes.
• Upload any private and/or unlisted content that is contravention of any of our terms.

In Summary

As I've said above, I don't intend to unreasonably restrict anyone's usage on this platform – it is simply about making sure the finest resources we have at our disposal are used to provide content that everyone can enjoy and access.

If you're an account that is at risk of falling foul of this policy we will contact you directly. If not, there's no need to worry.

There is any opportunity that expanded access may be able to be made available to regular financial supporters of our services, as the financial contributions allow us to expand our processing and storage capabilities. If you're interested in this please reach out, but what this would look like hasn't been fully considered as of the writing of this.

In What A Deck, I wax lyrical (or perhaps rant) about a game I've recently played on my Lenovo Legion Go.

If you know me, you'll know I'm terrible with finishing games I start. Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order was one of those games I picked up pretty much on launch, played for maybe 2-3 hours, then forgot about.

The great thing about having a gaming portable is that I can sit on the couch and watch a bit of TV or just hang out with the wife and dogs while I play an hour or two of a game in the evening. I've been able to finish way more games over the last year and a bit since I picked up the Legion Go then I have for years – it's great!

The Performance: Decent With a Few Stutters

When I first started up the game on my Legion Go, it actually performed terribly – I was a little worried the game just wasn't going to perform (despite what ProtonDB told me). However, once I'd updated and restarted Bazzite, it ran smooth as butter at 800p, topping out at the 36 FPS frame limit I have on my handheld.

Through the playthrough I continued to tinker with the settings and eventually settled on high settings. On high, the game still stayed glued to 36 FPS most of the time, with a few occasional stutters down to high-20s in particularly busy or particle-heavy scenes.

The thing certainly eats through battery though. I don't often play unplugged, but I gave the game a brief go unplugged and I think it wouldn't last much more than an hour on high settings with the second-highest default TDP settings. I'm sure you'd get a bit more time if you reduced the TDP and quality settings, but half-rate shading caused some weirdness so probably isn't an option.

The Game: Just the Right Length

There's nothing particularly unique or novel about the premise of the game. We have another story about a Jedi Purge survivor trying to make good on their former oath in a changed and dangerous galaxy.

As Cal Kestis, you start off working as a scrapper dismantling Old Republic vessels like Venators, just trying to live a quiet life and avoid detection. After having to use your powers to save a coworker, you're faced with a visit from the Inquisitors, and barely escape with your life.

From there it's a journey spanning multiple planets, from familiar ones like Ilum and Dathomir, to new ones like Bogano and Zeffo, as Cal searches for an important Jedi Holocron before the Empire can find it. You'll find yourself going back and forth between the different planets as you unlock new abilities and work towards your ultimate goal.

I'd describe the game as Souls-lite. It takes a whole lot of cues from the Souls series, from the level up mechanics, bonfire-like meditation system, and combat which can be punishing when you make a mistake or get too greedy for that one last attack. But it's an order of magnitude less difficult than the Souls series, making it a hell of a lot more accessible to the more casual player.

It should take you around 20 hours to get through the story, which I feel is just about right, though the final location of the game feels a little rushed and could have been fleshed out a little more.

Overall: Worth a Play

If you're wondering whether Jedi: Fallen Order is worth a play on your gaming handheld – my answer is a resounding yes! It plays beautifully on Linux, it still looks great, and you'll have a lot of fun working your way though a well written, if formulaic, Star Wars tale.

It's hard to believe that it's already six months into 2025. There's a whole lot of nastiness going on in the world, and I honestly don't see it getting any better in the short term.

And honestly, that was one of the reasons I started Fediverse.Games. I wanted to create a fun, safe space for people to come together and talk about games, or just life, in.

I'm still learning the best way to be inclusive, or an ally. I'm a middle-class, cis white male, and grew up a pretty sheltered life in a traditionally blue-collar city. But I've always been of the opinion that people should always be allowed to be their authentic self without being harmed by others.

And I hope Fediverse.Games makes the world just that little bit better for those who choose to join us.

2025 Strategy Progress Report

Back in January, I put together a 2025 strategy to help shape how we continued to grow and mature our services through the year. Overall, things are tracking well against these goals.

PeerTube

PeerTube launched in April. We've had a few hiccoughs around the functionality, especially when we switched our edge gateway configuration, which broke uploads. We're also still working to introduce livestream functionality. But overall, I've been surprised at the level of uptake for this service.

We have 44 users at the time of writing this post, with seven who've made uploads to the site. I wasn't expecting to have anywhere near this many, and it's made me seriously reconsider our priorities in terms of increasing available storage. We're nowhere near hitting the storage we have available at the moment, but for the purpose of ensuring sustainable growth, we definitely need to increase what we have available.

Writefreely

Writefreely (where this is being posted!) wasn't on the list of things to work on this year. But regardless, here we are.

It's just me on the instance right now – but our registrations are open and we've love to have you, should you want some fediverse-enabled long form blogging goodness!

Reliability & Resilience

We've worked hard on increasing our availability and reducing the frequency of outages. Our efforts have largely paid off, with all of our services with uptime greater than 99.5% (and a few at three 9s). We've also implemented automated alerting so we get early notice when things go wrong.

As part of our efforts on this, we also replaced our original pair of edge gateways running haproxy with a single gateway running nginx. nginx has proven to be significantly more reliable than haproxy, and brings additional capabilities we can implement in the future as well.

Financial Security & Sustainability

We also implemented two different donation platforms to give those wishing to donate multiple options to do so – so you can now donate to us with Liberapay and Ko-fi.

We don't have any donors at present – and that's okay. We're able to cover all of our expenses with no issues. But donations will allow us to grow sustainably and offer more services.

In Summary

It's been a wild ride over the last six months. I hope you'll continue with us on our journey!

My first experience using Linux was probably around twenty years ago, when I installed Ubuntu on my laptop (thanks to the people over on the Transport Tycoon IRC channel waaaaaayy back in the day).

Using Linux was a very different experience back then to how it is now. It didn't look the best, and getting non-native games to work was a pain. Of course Wine was still a thing back then and WineHQ's AppDB provided the same resources and reviews as it does today, but compatibility was far more limited then it is today. So it was an interesting experience trying it for the first time, but I fairly quickly switched back to Windows.

Over the years I've switched back and forth between various Linux distros, Windows versions and even a short period running with OSX on a Mac mini.

Regardless, I've still used at least one Linux-based PC consistently through the years – usually a lightweight laptop I use sitting on the couch in front of the TV of an evening (like I'm doing right now, in fact).

But over the years the proposition of Linux as the basis of a gaming PC has changed markedly. Wine's capabilities have continued to grow. Valve's contribution to the Linux gaming ecosystem through Proton (and the follow on upstreaming of a fair amount of their work into Wine itself) has allowed the ecosystem to develop in leaps and bounds.

When the current generation of gaming handhelds hit the market, I was immediately interested. The AMD chips that power these devices are pretty amazing – plenty of CPU cores and very capable iGPUs as well! I decided on the Lenovo Legion Go – it seemed to me like the best balance of price, performance, features and availability in Australia at the time.

But despite the device coming loaded with Windows 11 by default, it never even entered by head to run with Windows on the device. In fact, I never even booted to Windows. Straight away I decided to go with a Linux install, using Bazzite.

If you're unfamiliar with Bazzite, it comes from a broad family of community developed immutable Fedora flavours under the banner of Universal Blue. I'll talk about why I love Universal Blue in more detail in a future post, but to put it simply, it provides simple desktop images that make managing your install simple, regardless of whether you're a newbie or an expert. I firmly believe they're the future of increasing mainstream Linux adoption.

Bazzite was originally a bit weedy on the Lenovo Legion Go (as can be expected on a new piece of hardware, running an OS it wasn't specifically designed for). But over the last 18 months it's grown into a first class device, support wise.

And for a while I watched my last Windows device, my desktop gaming computer, continuing to grind slower and slower starting up and running, despite being (both when I put it together and still today) a fairly top end piece of tech. It's frustrating watching a device get slower and slower for seemingly no reason, so I thought why not, let's give Linux a go.

For the most part, using Linux (via Bluefin, Aurora and finally onto Bazzite) on my gaming computer has been almost entirely a pain-free experience. The vast majority of the games run with fairly similar (or better) performance, and as a whole it's a pretty set-and-forget experience, in comparison to how it was all those years ago when I first gave Ubuntu a try.

Don't like Steam? Use Lutris to integrate all of your other gaming services into your PC. There's Heroic Game Launcher for managing your GOG, EGS or Amazon libraries. There a whole ecosystem of (mostly) open source software to do pretty much anything you want to do with your games.

But there's the one thing that prevents Linux from being the perfect gaming operating system. If you guessed I'm referred to Kernel-level anti cheat, you'd be absolutely correct. And unfortunately, the big publishers are relying on it more and more. That's another conversation for another day, but there's a great resource available at Are We Anti-Cheat Yet to tell you if a game in your library (or one you're considering purchasing) is supported from an anti-cheat point of view in Linux.

So, as a whole, I'm pretty happy with my experience switching to Linux as a gamer. There's limitations of course, but overall I think Linux provides a very well designed and performant experience for the gamer these days.