lemmy.ml has a completely different idea of how it wants to be run. That happens to have been hurt a lot less by a sudden massive influx of new users, but that wasn’t the reason it was different. What do you even think beehaw could have done that would have better given their goals?
It’s not nearly as smooth and painless outside of Steam and Proton, but it’s still a lot better than it used to be. 3 hours of work is pretty rare.
Heroic and Lutris take some time to get setup up properly, but once they are they usually just work. If they don’t, popular games are usually easy to find help with. Older games are also more likely to just work, so for most people I think it’s mostly just games with uncooperative anti-cheat that cause major problems. There will be more minor problems than on Windows though, and a few games here and there that just stubbornly refuse to work.