To add, if you succumb to using a Microsoft account for your main Windows account, it seems you can swap out hardware a lot more without losing your license (although I imagine you can't swap out hardware and reinstall at the same time). I've had this one key since 2015 with many upgrades, including motherboard+cpu swaps, hard drive swaps, and a few reinstalls, and haven't lost the license.

With some trickery you only need the MS account for setup. You can also transfer the key to a completely new system.

With a bit more time to prune services/apps and set up something like simplewall to block everything else, you have a pretty decent setup. Sure, it's not FOSS, but neither is Steam or any of those games.

Looking at my personal selection of long-tail games, about 1/3 work perfectly on Linux, another 1/3 don't work at all, and the last 1/3 have various levels of yak-shaving tweaking settings before they run well. That last 1/3 is why I went back to Windows years ago.

If you went back years ago, you might have missed how good Linux gaming has gotten recently.

I understand that, it's why I went down my list of games to check the current state. A lot seem to work very well now, some are completely broken due to anticheat systems, and many still have discussion of tweaks and versions to coax them into running decently.

Seems like singleplayer games mostly work very well.

So did you name your computer Theseus?

:)