The thing I love more about the Cube series is that it introduced me to Marc A. Pullen
Long story short, it REALLY depends on the games. The vast majority of them will work perfectly fine, but there are a few that will have weird things, and a few that will not work at all. The problem is that the ones that won’t work at all are competitive multiplayer, so if you’re into that you’re going to have a bad time, if not it’s very likely that almost anything you try will just work (quite a few games are better with ProtonGE, more as a heads up than anything).
Can’t say I’ve used CUDA much, but in my experience (which includes over a couple dozens of computers running Nvidia drivers on Arch) a system upgrade has never broken a system because of Nvidia drivers in Arch. Make sure you use the dkms package, otherwise you need to remember to rebuild the modules for kernel or driver updates, this is a deliberate decision by Arch system. Although that’s probably not what happened to you, otherwise it would have reverted to open source drivers, and steam works perfectly fine with those. In fact unless you’re using Wayland I can’t think of a reason why steam wouldn’t launch that’s related to GPU drivers.
You might be exaggerating a little bit on the dates, 10 years ago in 2013 AMD was pretty shit on Linux. You had to choose between the closed source catalyst driver that made you have to prevent Xorg from being updated, or enjoy the slideshow with the Radeon open source one. The new driver only got announced in 2014, and released in 2015. I hear it’s much better now, but hadn’t had the chance to test it yet.
Just modify the script, right near the end where it says exec "$@", and add one line before to do anything before launching the game and one after to do anything after, e.g.
ludosavi restore --force
exec "$@"
ludosavi backup --force
If you do it per game you can write ludosavi restore --force && %command% && ludosavi backup --force which should execute the commands before and after the game.
I don’t remember the file specifically, but steam uses a script to launch games if I remember correctly. That script sets up some library paths and other stuff that’s needed, I remember editing that script a long while back to include either prime-run or gamemode, but I couldn’t find any references to that script on Google, whenever I’m on the computer I’ll try to find it.
Edit: I think the file is ~/.steam/debian-installation/ubuntu12_32/steam-runtime/run.sh or similar, look for a run.sh in some of the steam runtimes.
I’m okay with that, I used to be against, but I’ve come to realize that the only way to break the chicken and egg problem is to bring people over to Linux. Once the market share is large enough native versions will be appealing, and we can (and should) start to be stricter about non-native versions, but at less than 2% of Steam we’re too small of a market share to be making demands, even if that means millions of users.
Some of them are weird, I love Out of Space, play it with my wife almost daily, not only it has a native version but it works flawlessly on the Deck and even before that it worked flawlessly on my laptop for years, yet it’s marked as Unsupported. I haven’t checked other games because I usually rely on Protondb badges, but in any case the verified is not a good marker for amount of games that work on Linux, I played metro redux years before proton and it’s only getting the verified now.
Since people have already mentioned Factorio, Dead cells, and Stellaris (which btw all of paradox grand strategy games since CK2 have native versions). I’ll mention a lesser known game that me and my wife love to play, it’s similar to Overcooked (which btw Overcooked 2 has native Linux support) but a lot more calm: Out of Space