No, not proton and steam, DRM still matters to me. No, not wine or lutris, needing online access to 3rd party patches to get my files to install a working software game is not acceptable, this is DRM in my opinion. I mean ONLY natively supported Linux games that can be stored, installed and played completely offline. Online games I play are getting a pass as they don't even fucking work without internet access, so I don't see any real issue. No single player game should need online access to install or function. Of course the initial download and purchase will be online, as well as updates if I decide to do so. IMO many of these as arguments are why gaming suffers from so much quality control. People accept shit broken games because they're locked into a broken system. If you were to launch a game physically, it had to WORK or it flopped because updating would be almost impossible before the internet.

A whole lot of games on my list of 187 on GOG are not natively supported. Some games are really crushing to see gone. If we all just keep accepting windows or relying on 3rd party "fixes" and not native support, nothing will ever change. If you disagree I genuinely hope you're happy and encourage you to do as you please. Thanks for taking the time to check this out. :)

UPDATE:
I gave up. Keeping backups and organizing and ripping turned consuming media into a fucking job, I got sick of it. Trying to move to linux exacerbated everything. Barely even a handful of games were ever worth revisiting to me (Warband, KCD, DAO), same with TV and Movies. Music is different, and very much still something I manage a library of, but as for the rest, I quit. The stress and the work aren't worth it to me anymore.

Necro-Update over 1 year later:
I did completely give up on Linux. I have all of my games from standalone developer sites, GOG and Zoom-Platform all backed up in folders now. I use Playnite as my launcher and organizer, it also works completely offline and doesn't need to be updated if I don't want it to be, and supports offline backups of the media, tags, images etc. Fantastic little app. I use Jellyfin for streaming blu-ray/dvd rips. MP3's were always easy and MusicBee is my go to organizer and player, but I'll be changing eventually so I can get features like Spotify has, I'm thinking MediaMonkey.

Well, good luck. At the end of the day, we're not even recorded statistically outside of our browser user agent.

it's much better then one expect even warhammer III works fine on linux.

advanced games like mech warrior 5, control etc with DLSS works perfectly good

only reason i not using linux at this moment is that i am being lazy i have windows 10 and hate constant switching OS
the initiative is missing for me to permently switching OS.

i can give you a tip, you can install games on W7 and run it in linux
games are hard to install in linux for unkown reasons.

If you think Wine, an entirely open source project, represents a form of DRM... all I can ask is what mushrooms are you having, because I'd like some too :P.

Older games will never get patched or re-relased for modern OSes, be they newer versions of Windows, or Linux, so not being able to play them somehow is a bit of a problem. There have been cases where Wine can let you play games that no longer work properly on Windows 11, which is quite ironic.

You can very well use Wine or Proton outside of Lutris/Steam or any other wrappers and clients, simply with your GOG offline installers. I have been doing so for about a decade now and reached a point where all my gaming takes place on Linux and I've completely played through a number of AAA titles without issues.

Good luck. There are many source ports available for running "Windows only" games natively under Linux. Examples:-

- Commander Genius (Commander Keen)
- DevilutionX (Diablo)
- DOSBox Staging (thousands of DOS games)
- ECWolf (Wolfenstein 3D)
- GZDoom (Doom 1-2, Heretic, Hexen, Strife, Hedon)
- iortcw (Return To Castle Wolfenstein)
- JA2 Stracciatella (Jagged Alliance 2)
- OpenMW (Morrowind)
- Raze (Build Engine Games, ie, Blood, Duke Nukem, Shadow Warrior, etc)
- ScummVM (dozens of point & click games. AGS support was recently added)
- VKQuake (Quake 1)
- VKQuake 2 (Quake 2)
- ioquake (Quake 3)

There's probably more that I've missed.

https://arx-libertatis.org/ (Arx Fatalis)
https://github.com/JACoders/OpenJK (Star Wars: Jedi Academy & Jedi Outcast)
https://github.com/OpenLoco/OpenLoco (Locomotion)
https://openrct2.io/ (RollerCoaster Tycoon 2)
https://www.openttd.org/ (Transport Tycoon)
https://github.com/OldUnreal/UnrealTournamentPatches (official Linux binaries for Unreal Tournament '99)

It seems to me you are not fully understanding things, and so will have a steep learning curve at times.

But anyway, best of luck. :)

P.S. Change is often needs based, and so it will always be numbers that dictate ... not forgetting that convenience will also play a big part.

Neither Wine nor Proton needs internet access for installing games. And good luck with dependency hell that inevitably will happen at some point with native Linux installers. I play exclusively on Linux for many years now and quite a few times found running game in Wine far less problematic than native.
So if you want backup Linux installers and be able to install and play them without internet access you might be very disappointed because quite often they need dependencies that will be either not installed in your system or in incompatible version.

As I said before, with Wine/Proton you will only ever need your GOG offline installers. Do some games require additional components? Sure. But those games would require those additional components even on Windows (DX runtimes, VC Redist etc.), and they are typically set up for you by the offline installers anyway. No internet connection is needed if you go around the use of clients, which you certainly can.

https://www.spiderwebsoftware.com/exile3/linuxexile3.html

Spiderweb's Exile 3: Ruined world. A nice RPG in the vein of the nineties.

Unlike with Linux installers where any additional components need to be provided by user. Windows installers are typically actually more friendly towards what OP wants achieve with needed things bundled together.

On that topic, if possible @OP, always keep a back up of the installation ISOs of your systems, as well as the installers of the dependencies you end up using (like how systems with apt let you download deb installers with "apt download [package-name]").

Btw, feel free to check this thread, or even help adding reports to it:
Does it run on newer/other Linux/Mac versions?

Why do you think that Wine requires Internet for launching games (and other software)? It's open-source project and can be changed as you need.
I remember only just one thing about it: when you start Wine in first time, it tells something "wine could not find a wine-mono package for .Net applications" and asks to download it. But you can download it before and put it into certain directory, and Wine will use it.
I've launched many games offline with it, sometimes I needed to download more components for them (especially Microsoft ones), but in the end, Internet became unnecessary for running.