I finally separated some overkill hardware from my server rig (an RTX 3080 and a Ryzen 5800X3D) and put them in their own chassi. Installed Arch, again, of course. The server got a "new" Ryzen 5700G , which apparently is a repurposed laptop APU.

A few years ago, I used to fire up my desktop environment (dwm on X11) and launch Steam from a pseudo terminal.

On my reborn gaming PC, could I skip installing a desktop environment and still play games on Steam? Will it run directly from the console like - for instance - mpv does?

The purpose would be to minimize any overhead from dwm and X11. Which sounds ridiculous now that I "say" it out loud, because it's negligible, but still. My question still stands.