It's not hate, but we are now at a point where the vast majority of games just run, mostly thanks to Valve and the Wine/DVXK community's efforts. What Linux gamers fear now (with good reason) is that increased interest in the platform from companies more interested in money than freedom will undermine these efforts with anti-consumer and anti-FOSS initiatives, such as closed source clients, DRM, signed kernels, hardware attestations.
This is the mixed bag... and I'm glad that Valve is at the forefront of this one... While I feel the fees may be excessive in a lot of cases (same for mobile app stores), at least Valve seems to be good stewards of PC gaming as a whole, and building a lot of good will in the community.
I don't really want to see locked down hardware in the space any more than there already has been (Nintendo, Sony, X-Box, etc)... I think the PC centered gaming community largely wants a more open platform in general. In the long run, I don't see a lot of solid competition... especially with ever growing legacy libraries of content.
If I am signing my own kernel, that's awesome.
If Poettering is signing my kernel and reporting my UUID to websites along with proof I am viewing all ads, that is dreadful.
Unfortunately it will be the latter. Motherboards already have signed binary firmware blobs, some people cannot remove the Microsoft keys and still have functioning UEFI secure boot.
> closed source clients
If people really want Linux to be a viable alternative to Windows, run by a majority of the general public, it has to be possible to sell closed-source software that runs on it (where "it" means a broad range of different distros).
Yes, that means less freedom concerning that particular software. But without it, the platform is a tiny niche that's easily run over by the hardware OEMs.