u/priapus

SpeedRunners, Ultimate Chicken Horse, Duck Game, Towerfall Ascension, and Stick Fight are some of my favorites. Crawl is also really good, but a bit more complex so depends on the age of the kids. Also can never go wrong with a platform fighter, Rivals of Aether 2 is great.

There's gotta be an issue in your setup. I've never had audio issues and performance should be identical when running at the same resolution.

Its main goal is to be a frontend for Epic, GOG, and Amazon games. It does also support manually adding games, so you can use it similarly to Lutris if you'd like. They support most of the same features, so its just preference.

I think his is underestimating how big HL3 is as a part of gaming culture. Half Life really wasn't part of my generation, but I grew up with HL3 being memed constantly. The constant fake leaks and rumors have kept the idea alive. Just a couple months ago I saw a lot of people genuinely believe it was going to be announced during The Gaming Awards thanks to a leak that Valve would be present. Every gaming event has chat full of people spamming Half Life 3 memes. Plus, Alyx got a lot of younger gamers to play the series.

If Half-Life 3 were actually announced the hype would 100% be there, even if most of it will be from people who had never played the games.

Genius way to create a ton of ill will towards Valve, SteamOS and Linux as a whole.

Many mods were made way easier with a recent Proton update. Lots of games use DLL overrides to load mods, which required setting launch commands to use through Proton. This is no longer an issue, so any mods that work by doing this will now function perfectly out of the box.

I recently nodded GTA and the mod had specific instructions for Linux, which I was able to simply ignore thanks to this update.

Most games that use the Nexus mod manager can also be nodded manually, but I do agree that having a native launcher is really nice. I've already used it with Cyberpunk. Hopefully native Mod Organizer 2 will happen one day!

Replacing it with Bazzite is a great option if you want to do anything that SteamOS is too restrictive for without sacrificing any of the features

Edit: to be clear, SteamOS will let you do just about anything, but the way the updates work will override a decent amount of changes you make, since the OS is immutable by default and designed not to be modified.

The more devices running Linux, the more games and launchers that will support Linux. I wouldn't want to buy a SteamOS ROG Ally, but I definitely want it to exist.

The gaming mode is still the Steam Client. It's just the big picture client which has built in additional features when used on a Steam Deck.

You can get very high end office chairs incredibly cheap if you looks used. It's not hard to all to find Steelcase Leaps and Herman Miller Aerons under $300 on Craigslist, eBay, FB Marketplace, or used office supply stores. I got my Steelcase Leap for $220 and it's been going strong for over 5 years now.