Gabadabs

You don't need to use steam to use wine and proton. I do this pretty much every day, playing games from GOG, or from itch.io. where you get the executable for the game doesn't matter. I'm currently part way through a run of Baldur's Gate 1 from GOG, and it's a Windows executable. You could set up a wine prefix manually, but there's options like lutris, bottles, or play on Linux to handle that for you. I've played games from battle.net and ea app as well, all on linux by setting up proton in Lutris.

You can run non-steam windows games on linux as well, even without steam installed.

Dark Souls 2 gives you a very large amount of human effigies that can restore your max HP, and in a very early game area there is a ring you can wear that limits how low your max HP can go. It's in a chest in a very early game area that you will walk by and see guaranteed in order to progress. What I think is more interesting is how you think it's the norm and expected that you should be able to play through an action game and rarely die. It's okay to enjoy power fantasy games, where dying means you fail - and you just get to retry the part you failed. But that doesn't mean that enjoying the process of learning an enemy patterns and overcoming adversity is insane. Those games are not power fantasy action games, you are supposed to feel weak. Because when you feel weak and then you kill that damn boss anyways, it's one of the best feelings ever in gaming. On top of that, a lot of the consumables that you're talking about you can buy infinite of. Like I said, the games aren't that hard, enemy patterns are usually pretty simple with only a few attacks, and as you move through areas you learn what gimmicks the enemies are going to abuse and can just adapt to them. Most enemies can be easily parried, or you can kill problem enemies with poison arrows or magic from a distance. Often I think that the people who are convinced that souls games are brutal and not fun are people who try to play them like they are some kind of action hero instead of taking advantage of the tools the games give you to use, especially the summons.

The games can certainly be punishing in key areas, and it's better that newer entries and other soulslikes make an effort to make learning the games be more friendly. Death is punishing, sure. Losing consumables, fighting through the same enemies again, or even just having to run back to a boss - these are all sources of friction in this genre. Up front, I do wish these games had accessibility options, I do want more people to experience what they have to offer. But death really just isn't as punishing as a lot of people make it out to be. Dark Souls isn't that hard, in most cases. There's certainly bullshit, and it takes time to learn enemy patterns, and dying can be bad feeling. I think that without the friction, if you could overcome every location and boss on the first or second try, these games would just kind of suck. So it's a balance.

I saw this recently and it kind of blew my mind how good the animation is. Highly recommend.

I use Samsung phones for work, it's really just some UI changes, and they're genuinely much worse than just stock android. Samsung is just trying to differentiate itself.

I've been working on getting the true ending in hollow Knight, and I'm currently trying to beat some of the DLC content. I'm get to play silksong soon

You can select to run them in proton, rather than just normal wine, in lutris. I've been doing it to run games from gog for years with few issues, namely games that are old and have the same problems working on windows as well. So... Yes they will?

Linux compatibility is fine. You can pretty easily install gog games by logging into your gof account on lutris. It'll let you see your whole library and install directly from it, and any games that work in proton will work just fine using proton via lutris. You can also just add your gog game as a non-steam game and run it there.

We don't usually work with cash. Most people I know don't carry cash at all, and it's a pain to get, since most paychecks are direct deposit. You've gotta head to an ATM or the bank, or ask for cash at checkout at the store.

They just won't function properly. There are permissions problems and while some games might work, you will run into games that simply won't launch, or that have regular crashes, among other issues. I recommend installing the games you want to play on Linux there, and the ones you can't on windows.

Just putting the ISO directly into the ventoy folder on the USB should just work, it's odd that you had to mount it and drag the files. If you're trying to use games installed on one drive between windows and Linux, I do not recommend attempting that. Windows can't natively read Linux drive formats like ext4, and if you try to play games on an NTFS drive on Linux you WILL run into problems. Your cloud saves should just work normally though.