Not really that big of a deal, but Baldur's Gate 3 can be launched with the --skip-launcher command line parameter to, well, skip the launcher.

I wanted to be a bit more productive in my spare time, but I have made a huge mistake:
I started playing Vagrus - The Riven Realms again.

The world building in Vagrus is excellent. It's set in a post-apocalyptic fantasy Roman empire, and there is a massive amount of text that details the world, and the people living in it. There is so much to read, that the devs even thought it necessary (and rightfully so) to display a warning about the sheer amount of text on the game's startup screen, with the suggestion to refund it if one doesn't enjoy a lot of reading. Sooo, of course this is the perfect game for me - or would be if I had more spare time.

The game is a mixture of trading sim and role playing game. You play a vagrus (a caravan leader), and travel the land trading wares, transporting passengers, spreading gossip and doing missions for different factions, you also have a lot of story elements that you can (and should) follow. There is turn-based combat, and during story events there are plenty of skill checks.

The game is relatively difficult, due to its interwoven mechanics. You need to calculate relatively tightly in order to make a profit, but if you loose people in combat, not having reserves might lead into a morale-loss and hunger death spiral... Also, due to the game's grim settings, the choices one faces are more often than not to either do what is right, or to survive.

My top answers are of course Kerbal Space Program, Dwarf Fortress and Stellaris.

However, all those have been mentioned already, so, to add something new to the list: Pathfinder: Kingmaker. It is currently my favourite cRPG.

Edit: Since you mentioned "Great Linux ports": Kingmaker has a game-breaking bug in the Linux version regarding Gamepad input. However, as long as you play it with mouse and keyboard (as the gods intended - insert PC Master Race meme), the Linux version is working perfectly fine. However, if you plan on playing it on the Steam Deck, you might want to play the Windows build.

This. I had written a similar last paragraph in my answer below, but decided to delete it before submitting.

I have to suffer Windows at work. No way on earth this sad excuse for an operating system gets anywhere near my gaming PC. I want my gaming PC to be for fun stuff, not use it to torture myself.

First things first: This hasn't happened to me in ages. I even stopped looking at ProtonDB. Stuff just runs.

However, if a game I buy really wouldn't run on Linux, I would just refund it (if possible) and play something else. I have a pile of shame that could fill a hundred lifetimes, I really don't need to play this one particular game.

I'm not sure what problem you are encountering exactly, but switching to another virtual terminal might still work. By default, the virtual terminals are linked to the F1-F8 keys, and the combo to switch from a graphical session usually is CTRL+ALT+Fx.

On that other virtual terminal, you might be able to kill KWin.

will the screen be damaged if I do this

Yes. Probably immediately and violently if the capacitor was used as a low-pass filter or a similar configuration. If the capacitor was used in a high-pass filter (or similar), then the damage might take some time to appear (if at all), and it might not be as violent.

what could go wrong

If it was a low-pass filter or similar, then expect other components to overheat quickly. Depending on what type of component dies first, you might be lucky and just get a light-emitting resistor. If however an electrolytic capacitor dies first, then you'll probably have to deal with a lot of nasty smelling smoke, that might take days to get rid of. Also, overheating electrolytic capacitors can explode if you are unlucky enough, what might do physical damage to the circuit board, or even the casing or panel.

While gaming performance with the nVidia drivers is often better (I'm talking about FPS alone, not taking into account the card price), the interaction with the desktop environments is way better for AMD, because their drivers are fully maintained as part of open source projects. What I mean are the tools to configure display resolution, and if you are using multiple monitors, their relative positioning. Everything just works. This alone is reason enough for me to strongly recommend AMD over nVidia.

Acquisitions felt kinda cool when Microsoft was dishing them out like nobody’s business prior to the pandemic.

No, it did not. Consolidation usually is bad for employees and customers, and anyone who hasn't been living under a rock for the last 150 years has had plenty of opportunities to observe this.

The main issue with btrfs is the RAID 5/6 write hole. If you aren't planning to use RAID 5/6, it's fine.

There are some other problems too, but those don't affect data integrity. The most annoying one currently is that defragmenting breaks reflinks, such that snapshots get turned into full copies, potentially wasting a lot of space. (I have honestly no idea how noticeable fragmentation is on SSDs, and if defragmenting is even worth it nowadays.)

Afaik the --reflink isn't needed any more with modern coreutils versions.

I would recommend to play this on Switch though. That's because, unlike the PC version, the Switch version can be played without an Ubisoft Account. All one has to do is to disconnect the Switch from the internet, and suddenly the game runs without login.