You can play any games you want, though? Throw an emulator on there and play all your old games. Install non-steam games, add them to Steam using its very easy to use “Add a non-Steam game” button, and play as normal.
Heck, if you don’t like Linux you can just install Windows on the thing.
Steam takes a lot of money and then turns around and invests it into the gaming community.
My poor parents phone bill when I started using Twitter over SMS…