It is.

And honestly, remembering the stuff I had to do to play the original Doom at a LAN party back in the day.

• Buy a sound card (some PCs came with, mine didn’t)
• Install the sound card drivers correctly
• Edit the computer’s config.sys file to assure the operating system drivers were loaded in such an order as to allow enough of Bill Gates’ 640 kb RAM available to load a game
• Borrow (!) a network card from my dad’s computer, and open up the PC to jam it in there
• Install network drivers
• Path the physical coaxial network cables through all PCs and terminate them correctly
• Configure the game to know which direct memory address (bank 1) and hardware interrupt request id (5) it needed to talk to the sound card
• Yes hello also find a smaller mouse driver and load it correctly because by now all the networking and audio stuff is making those 640kb tight

We all did that back then!

If someone was a “gamer” they were not afraid to do this because they either knew how or knew a friend who was happy to help.

Compare that to what I do today that most gamers consider “mind-numbingly super nerd impossible bullshit lol linux sux”, running GNU GUIX:

• Find a channel for the nvidia drivers. Add it to my system config, 2 lines.
• Find a channel for Steam. Add it to my system config, 2 lines.
• Oh no I had to add 2 more lines for nvidia by following clear documentation.

O hey everything just works. Proton kicks in automatically.