In what situations is this a blocker for gaming? Like, genuinely, who actually had any significant issues from it? Top 1% Counter Strike pros? I've been playing games on Wayland for ages and I never understood how anyone can think the experience is worse, let alone so bad it's unusable.

I haven't played Doom 3, but it sounds very similar to what Prey 2017 has - all the computers in the game have (in-universe) touch input, so you can use them just by pressing the interact key while looking at a display. You can even fire rubber-tipped foam darts at screens to trigger a click in the spot where the dart hit!

Have you played games like My Summer Car and Jalopy? They might be too focused on car simulation compared to what you're after, but they're worth a look.

There's also the Dying Light's expansion campaign The Following, which is based around travelling in a car which you have to refuel and upgrade with scavenged materials. It's open world, but it fits the rest of your description well. The main game has no vehicles at all, but I'm pretty sure you can skip right to the expansion if you want.

If you're looking for underrated indies, I'd recommend Ctrl Alt Ego, a fantastic attempt at an indie immersive sim in the style of Deus Ex or System Shock, and Worlds, a unique stealth-action-exploration game that feels like something from the early 2000s, though it does require putting up with some ambitious indie jank. I'm not sure which games I would call my favourites, but those are definitely up there.

Deus Ex: Invisible War. It might have been a symptom rather than a cause, but it was a clear example of how the PC was sidelined as a game platform throughout the 00s, and the simplification of genres traditionally found on PC for console hardware.

Also, on an individual level, the game sucked! The original didn't have the best voice acting, but it was hammy and endearing. Invisible War's was somehow just wooden and boring. The levels were cut up into tiny chunks separated by loading screens, but even as a whole were smaller and more claustrophobic than almost anything in the original. The weapons were less fun (universal ammunition??), the inventory system was gimped, menus were all big and slow to navigate, stealth mechanics were oversimplified, there were fewer notes and logs and books and news articles in the game world... You get the idea. It's honestly a miracle that the franchise ever recovered.

It's an inevitable consequence of permissive licensing, especially on behalf of a company as heavily invested in walled gardens as Apple. They won't do anything they're not forced to do, unless it will somehow benefit them way more than anyone else. It's as simple as that.

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/

As we understand it, this contract clearly states that the terms do not intend to contradict any rights to copy, modify, redistribute and/or reinstall the software as many times and as many places as the customer likes (see §1.4). Additionally, though, the contract indicates that if the customer engages in these activities, that Red Hat reserves the right to cancel that contract and make no further contracts with the customer for support and update services. In essence, Red Hat requires their customers to choose between (a) their software freedom and rights, and (b) remaining a Red Hat customer. In some versions of these contracts that we have reviewed, Red Hat even reserves the right to “Review” a customer (effectively a BSA-style audit) to examine how many copies of RHEL are actually installed (see §10) — presumably for the purpose of Red Hat getting the information they need to decide whether to “fire” the customer.

If you contractually limit user rights to redistribute the code, then how can you actually comply with the GPL? Redistribution isn't an optional clause.

Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days. The game was a commercial and critical bomb, but it's the only cover shooter I've ever enjoyed. It's just such an unrelentingly visceral, disorienting, harsh game, with one of the main aesthetic gimmicks being that it emulates the look and feel of a late 2000s amateur video. It's hard to describe without seeing it in action, but it was audacious as shit for what was meant to be a big budget, AAA title.

LGPL is still permissive as far as I'm concerned! But yeah, I get your point. The reality is that corporations like Apple will never do anything but (being optimistic...) the bare legal minimum, and permissive licensing willingly and knowingly grants everyone the right to take your work, extend it, and then pretend it's their own with nothing more than a footnote in a Credits text no one reads. It's leechable by design.

Do they do it with copyleft stuff? As far as I know, Apple has taken an aggressive stance against using or distributing GPL software, like refusing to ship modern (>3) versions of Bash, pushing for the adoption of Clang over GCC, and banning GPL software from the App Store.