Mathematically for every game you buy from Steam about 0.07% of what you pay for it ends up flowing to help the Linux gaming ecosystem.

Valve is personally financing over 100 open source devs across wine, proton, dxvk, drivers, Vulkan, etc. 100 people at 100k it’s at least 10 Million yearly investment, and that’s just what they directly finance on open source devs, their own employees also contribute and projects like the Steam Deck, Machine and Frame require specific things outside of those 100 open source devs for which they hire people directly. I don’t know where your 0.07% number comes from but regardless the point is that by paying the same price for the same product I get some benefits like cloud saves and I’m directly financing that. Whereas if I were to buy the game from GoG I would not, simple as that. Also, I don’t see GoG investing anything into making games DRM free, so while buying from them does signal you like DRM free it doesn’t fund that.

Linux was not in my main gaming PC until recently because until maybe 5 years ago it was a PITA for it and frankly I didn’t have the patience to, after hours working making and bugfixing software, come home and have to fix problems in games in Linux before I could have some R&R playing a game.

This, this is what Valve changed. Like I said, you migrated to Linux as your gaming OS recently, after Valve pushed the scales, you are the proof that what Valve is doing is improving the Linux gaming landscape. You just don’t see it because you’ve migrated after that change was in motion, so to you it’s just a natural progression, but as someone who was full time Linux gamer since before Steam came to Linux I can absolutely tell you that it’s not.

Gaming on Linux had always ben a Chicken and egg problem, not enough users to justify the investment from studios, not enough games available to justify users migrating. Valve broke that cycle. By providing an easy way to play games that weren’t made for Linux, users had a way to keep playing their games when migrating, even better the devs would see how many users were doing so, and be incentivized to maintain compatibility even if through proton.

To achieve this Valve invested so heavily into wine and dxvk that it made the ecosystem better even outside of Steam. This moved a lot of people over to Linux gradually (like you), and made other companies start paying attention, and at least attempt to make things compatible.

I’m younger than you, I don’t remember the 80s, but I do remember gaming on the 90s, however I’m from a third world country, so until midway through the 00s most of my games were pirated. Not that I knew it back then, I went to the store and bought the games, the fact that they were copies wasn’t something I truly understood until much later in life, but here’s the thing, I didn’t had any alternative, my entire childhood I cracked games thinking that that’s what you do with games to be able to play them.

All that is to say I understand the DRM-free appeal, but if a game developer blocks me from playing a game I paid for I won’t feel obligated to give them money again, and likely won’t give them money again for any future games as they’re not trustworthy. No DRM is perfect, eventually it will get cracked. So while I agree with you and would like to play my games without DRM, I would first like to be able to play my games before even worrying about DRM, and that was not an easy possibility before Steam for Linux.

I will not change your mind because to you DRM is more important than Linux. That is to say, we would both prefer to run DRM free games on Linux, but you would rather keep a windows partition to play DRM free games than play DRMd games on Linux, and for me it’s the other way around.