You know ad-supported kindles? Expand that to phones, TVs computers. Anything that can show or play an ad while it is off or when you turn it on. It’s free real estate!

This is not right, even per capita the US has a higher % o immigrants than the UK, although they are lower than some of the countries you mention.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/immigration-by-country

YMMV of course but I was playing Timberborn just the other day on Mint, on an Nvidia card, through Heroic. Proton seems to have been a gamechanger. I have just made my first steps into switching my daily driver myself. I may have been lucky but all the games I have wanted to play have worked so far. I also have a Steam Deck, which is what has encouraged me that it may be possible.

I second containers. I use Unraid and have found it pretty simple to get started. At one point I was using a vm on unraid as my gaming machine, although I have moved away from that and now have a low power Unraid server for hosting.