Whether it’s a rage-click community, a community made for an agenda, or both, I don’t know, but in either cases, I wouldn’t see as surprising for the mods in such a community to be very trigger-happy. Best you can do, I think, is to block communities and individuals with such a profile, and to recommend others to not engaging (remember to explain why if you do it, btw).

I’d have 4 main solutions I can think of, and that can be used together if needed:

• VMs for running Steam and for games that MUST use Steam.
• Emulators, wrappers and source ports for games that allow that, e.g. BSNES for running River Girls Zero, Joiplay / Artemis / EasyRPG / AquariaOSE for games that use compatible engines, etc.
• Having a separated computer you can use 100% offline (requires sideloading games)
• The annoying idea some users give that strays from the original question, but that I think that is valid for once - to get the games from places that openly distribute it DRM free

Mint seems decent all around. No cutting edges nor it’s specialized in any areas, but it’s a jack of all trades, and rather stable.

Something I personally do is to load games from their entries in the start menu. And when there’s no installer to set the start menu item, a program like Alacarte, or manually editing the files that handle those entries on Linux, the .desktop files. Alternatively, linking the executable files to either Heroic or Steam can also be viable.

As for how Linux handles executables, if it’s a native Linux program, you usually need to set the read-write-execute permissions to be able to launch them. Tutorials usually suggest to run chmod 777 /path/to/executable, or other variants that set full permissions to all users and user groups, but as a security concern, I would suggest running chmod 700 /path/to/executable, as this would give the full permissions only to the current user (there’s a bit of a formula to come up with this number, btw).

And regarding VMs, they are as fast as the hardware allows minus the host system’s demands, so it will always be slower than baremetal installs. But in some specific cases, it’s still the best option.

Regarding gaming support, Heroic Launcher also help a bunch, since you can easily set up multiple versions of forks of Wine (Valve’s Proton being one), or even to use the system ones.

About the wifi issue, maybe it is some oddly specific hardware that the devs tackled only in Mint 22. And in a bit of a humorous tone, what’s learning without a bit of struggle? 😅

And lastly, besides dual boot, you could also set up a VM with the secondary system(s) you want. Just worth noting hardware-dependent games, e.g. many from the Windows 9x time, will struggle on VMs.

On the joke, define “sane”. 😬

On a serious note, I think there are valid reasons to have several VMs other than “I was bored”. In my case, for example, I have a total of 7 VMs, where 2 are miscellaneous systems to test things out, 2 are for stuff that I can’t normally run on Linux, 2 are offline VMs for language dictionaries, and 1 is a BlissOS VM with Google programs in case I can’t/don’t want to use my phone.

To my knowledge, besides the newest updates not necessarily being as stable, but also, other softwares that interact with it would need time to adapt themselves to be sure they’re as compatible as they were before. In a situation of constant updates, other software would always be on a situation of catching up, whereas updates that take a bit longer to land allow “for the dust to set down”.

About gaming, from my personal experience, it’s overall pretty straight forward. When issues happen, you just got to have patience to read through logs and search up on Google or similar any suspicious parts of the log. Worst part is usually DRM/anticheat, but from what I can gather, usually pretty isolated cases are problematic due to compatibility, usually requiring the devs to go out of their ways to make the DRM incompatible.

As for the distros question, perhaps Linux Mint? It trades off bleeding edge updates for the sake of stability. Just avoid the Debian-based variant of Mint for now as it’s still in beta.

Both tools can be used from the terminal like most Linux programs, which should also give you better control during troubleshooting and also in the rarer cases of having to set up/run some more temperamental games. There are also graphical programs that handle Wine/Proton in a more friendly way, such as Heroic Launcher, Lutris and, specifically for Proton, Steam itself.

There are cases where AppImages aren’t viable indeed, like with programs that require ring 0 access. But limitations exist for all formats, so perhaps another good alternative is having multiple versions of a given program, like downloading the equivalent deb package through apt while also keeping the appimage version. It would bloat the storage for a potential automated configuration, but it should help with ensuring compatibility.

One thing I like to have with me is the AppImage version of programs when possible, since they usually work out of the box. Also helps ensuring I don’t depend on the availability of whatever package manager the system uses.