

Yeah the comments about Steam being a monopoly are weird to me. Steam has a huge market share, but they don’t own the whole market and they don’t try to prevent you from buying your games elsewhere. Proton even works on non-steam games. I’ve used it to play WoW private servers on Linux.
If Valve isn’t a pro-consumer company, then I don’t know what company could possibly fit the criteria. They’re not perfect, but they’ve earned the trust they have. I’ll trust Valve until they give me a reason not to.
I bought one of those Guide to Linux books back in like 2008 that came with an Ubuntu install disc. Installed it on an old family PC but I didn’t really know what I was doing so I didn’t get far.
Then in college I used Mint on my desktop and Peppermint on my Acer Aspire netbook. Around graduation I bought a Chromebook and ran Xubuntu in Crouton.
Went a few years without Linux and recently dual-booted with Pop OS on my gaming PC. Feels good.