Most gamers go with 3., buy a XBox, Playstation, Nintendo, or 4., stick with mobile games, in both cases go with a walled garden solution.

Yeah, thats a totally fair addition.

In fact, it’s one I chose at home (option 3) because I was unwilling to compromise my computing environment just so I could browse the internet and program on the same device I play games with.

If publishers were comfortable developing for Linux, maybe that would change, I don’t think it has to be so binary as “either you have total control or none at all”, especially since there’s so many non-free components to your system already and multiplayer games are a luxury product (and thus; totally optional).

The irony is that they already do, that is what Android games developed with NDK are.

So it would be rather easy to port such games to GNU/Linux, they don't bother, because of the cost/benefit in doing so.

its not that easy, Androids userland is pretty far from a valid Linux target, there’s a lot of platform hand holding that exists.

It is the same in what matters, ISO C and ISO C++ support, OpenGL ES, Vulkan, OpenSL ES and OpenMAX.

Much closer than porting Win32/DirectX, LibGNM(X)/OrbisOS and so on.

I think a better comparison would be porting a game from PC to XBox.

Technically the renderers and kernels are the same, but almost everything else, from debuggers and SDKs to peripherals is different.

Ah, ok from that point of view you're right.

Option 3 was already stated: don't buy software that requires a DRM rootkit. Vote against it with your wallet.

Battlefield 6 requires a rootkit? Battlefield 1942 and 2 are still fun and don't. I've had only Linux on my home computers for like a decade now, and Windows has since then become unusable so I'm not going back. Why would I buy software that won't run?

Your wallet has next to no voting power as is, in part due to self inflicted injuries making gnu/linux unviable for game development. Or any app development for that matter.