If I'm not mistaken, the russian forum usually has standalone patches too. if not, you can probably get the full game updated to the latest version from wherever and copy-paste everything into the game's folder

that "a little effort" meant specifically finding the way to launch games without Steam, I reckon. apparently most games on Steam have only the very basic Steam DRM: make a back up of the game, deal with the DRM, and keep it available to play whenever

"came out of beta", though. in the first few days, or weeks, after the official release, there was extensive discussion about the issues and shortcomings of Cosmic, if I recall correctly

edit: whoops, I was too slow

If you play through Steam, since using Proton is enabled by default, you just need to install a game.

Sometimes you have to go into the game's Steam settings and manually pick a different Proton version if the game is old (usually an older version) or if the game is very new (Proton Experimental or gloriouseggroll's fork of Proton, ProtonGE, this one being a manual install from gloriouseggroll's GitHub), and you can find user reports on ProtonDB on what version other users have been using;

if you use Steam and GoG or other sources with no launcher, the main third party game launchers (Lutris, Heroic) use UMU by default, which means they leverage Steam's Proton to install and play games, basically doing what Steam does, just outside of the Steam app, therefore the experience there is the same as Steam.

This means that you can use most "normal" distros regardless of what they're marketed for. I've played games the same way on PoP! OS and EndeavourOS, simply plug and play (barring some edge cases).

Native, Flatpak or other doesn't really matter for the most part, though native is usually the most straightforward and hassle-free.

tldr: install any standard distro you like and Steam + alternate launcher and you'll find out that the gaming experience is almost completely plug-and-play

I've had no issues with nVidia GPU and TW3, running it with protonGE 9.26. Try that first if you haven't already

I have no answer to your question, but if you're looking for alternatives, hardened Firefox forks such as LibreWolf, Fennec, IronFox etc all have varying degrees of anti-fingerprinting features. I know for sure that Fennec withholds battery and gyro data, but gives timezone data, while IronFox can spoof the latter with a toggle and reports a spoofed screen size

edited

nobody's personal device hygiene is perfect

fair point. guess I'll try to understand a bit better how everything works before making a decision

side note: I like how in this thread we have a crow, a f3nyx and a raccoon lol

Read somewhere that sometimes it's best to ask for obfuscation of personal info rather than straight up removal, as a middle ground you can both agree on, e.g. truncating your name and surname in your reviews.

If you're not in a country with strong personal information rights, try that next; if you are, you may need to contact your local data protection authority to file a complaint

Thanks for sharing, I was already using a decent anti-fingerprinting browser (Fennec) but the fact that it gave away my timezone made me research a bit more and I'm now on IronFox, which has a toggle to spoof it, and reports a fake screen resolution. Great! I'm now unique on coveryourtracks though

Understood. I mentioned TW3 because I found it to be very anal about Proton versions, but I've never had any problems that could be attributed to nVidia with any games I've played. I ran the official, close-source drivers

Interesting, how useful is it if I'm always behind a VPN and browse privately (hardened browser, ad blocker, no-script, never logged in etc.)?

May be wrong but the way I see it it doesn't help me much?

IronFox from here:

https://github.com/ironfox-oss/IronFox

desktop should "leak" more or less the same data, I think

I installed it by adding their repo to F-droid and it worked, try that

Weird, my Fennec must've had additional configurations I forgot about since it didn't give out that info. I uninstalled it for IronFox so I can't check it! I mentioned LibreWolf but that's on desktop, so no gyro info there