Court room stenographer

Is it just my hardware?

It is not your hardware

Am i using linux just wrongly for years?

Not really

Is it my fault?

Not really

The main issue from what I can tell is you are trying to play older windows games which can be pretty hit or miss. More recent pc games often support the steam deck which is usually a good sign for compatibility.

Gaming on Linux has greatly improved over the last couple years (especially thanks to proton/steam deck) but if you are trying to run older games that were never designed to run to it or you want to play online games with aggressive anti-cheat it is still going to be a bit of a struggle.

I would recommend sticking to an Arch based distro like EndeavourOS (as it is similar to the SteamOS) or a Debain based distro and not swap around too much so you can get a feel for it without having a bunch of things change on you all the time like package names and the like.

All that said if your jam is older windows games and you have access to windows and are tired of messing with the OS and just want to play games just use windows, try linux another day.

Some games are trickier than others for sure. Are you using protondb as a reference?

Anno 1404 is a 15 year old game with aggressive DRM so I could tell right away that it would be one of the more tricky titles.

It really comes down to if you are trying to use newer hardware or not. Debian based systems usually run fine out of the box on older systems.

For newer hardware your going to want new drivers and kernel versions which you get with a rolling release distro.

They are definitely AB testing things like rejecting ad blockers.

It's time to move on, all the cool kids are driving wind stars now

Over the network can be hit or miss but the usb cable and the drivers from the AUR have yet to fail me

I've been trying fin Droid which works well but it's definitely a work in progress.

Russians seem willing to flatten Ukraine with artillery to capture things I wonder if they will be as willing to do that on their own territory

That works until it doesn't. Though it has been a few years since there was a nice notable example.

While everyone is talking about Walmart and universities I just see the reason the US will never have public health care

If you know anything about Lenovo you would know that if ARM laptops started to have high market share they would have like 35 mediocre models on offer in a year.

Some of the think pad lines are still good but their consumer offerings and a couple of the think pad lines are trash.