Sadly I do non of my gaming through steam. But someone else might find this answer useful!

May I ask a question out of curiosity? If my system dies on a hardware level, and I have to save my hard drive, how can I access it then if I can’t put it in another system?

Up to XP I used several dos versions, win3.1, 95, 98, 98SE, and then XP. From there I skipped one version, so 7, then 10. Worked out pretty well so far. So my next windows will hopefully also be 12, and I hope it will have a better UI than 11.

Linux is also interesting, but I like gaming without fiddling too much with my operating system, I just don’t want to commit my rare spare time to that. I want install -> play.

Absolutely, remember when reddit killed itself with a shitty step?