For gaming, I honestly agree. Things are better with Lutris but running programs in their native OS is always going to be a better experience. Still, I think it’s very cool that you can run any of that in Linux. Valve is making some awesome progress with that…

Xubuntu… It’s light weight and pretty much everything is kind of Debian or kind of redhat anyway…

The charm of rolling my own died off when I got old enough to buy better hardware if I wanted to go faster…

If it really bothers you, I think you could set up authentik (or some other idp) and point all your login needs at it… Though, it’s not going to make things easier for you, just the opposite. Probably a good learning experience though.

deleted by creator

Investment… It’s a bit too simple to just say money, but investment wraps it up better. Chips may not be open source, but they are physically there to be taken apart and reproduced. That’s what a lot of those Chinese knockoff chips are (baring the ones where the designs are outright stolen). The only thing that stops you from doing the same thing as those bootleg fabs is being willing to soak time and resources into the project. It’s just a big project. Like a Bloomfield i7 (which is old and fairly large) has 731 million transistors in it…