the interesting thing for me is that my assumption was that linux gaming would not pick up until the desktop experience of installing and using games would improve, but i somehow missed that creating a separate "game desktop" would do the trick. i didn't consider before that it absolutely makes sense to keep games in their own environment which does make the task a bit easier.

but this also validates another assumption of mine, that it would take funding probably driven by commercial interest (and here i was thinking of companies like redhat) to fix this.