Do I have to use steam?

No, but it’s a relatively-plug-and-play way to get access to a lot of commercial games.

GOG.com is another alternative, and there are a few other stores.

There are also free games in your existing distro. They aren’t generally comparable to commercial games, but they’re there.

Which tittles do you recommend for integrated intel hd2500 graphics on linux

I mean…that’s pretty broad. Maybe if you could list some games that you like, or a genre at least?

I can list games that I like, but they might fall completely flat with other people.

From a performance standpoint, that’d be probably any 2D game and…let’s see. The HD 2500 was released in 2014, and wasn’t a stellar performer at that time, so probably any 3D game that was released prior to that date?

Like, you can probably look at any list of popular older games for ideas; doesn’t need to be Linux-specific.

searches

https://gamesreq.com/50-best-games-for-weak-pcs-2025-edition/

From that list, games that I’ve played that I enjoy are Half-Life 2, Hades, Terraria, Vampire Survivors, Slay the Spire, Balatro, Fallout: New Vegas, Far Cry 3, FTL: Faster Than Light, Basion, Transistor, Don’t Starve, The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth, Max Payne 2, Factorio, and Rimworld, all of which you can get on Steam and have worked fine for me on Linux, but…again, it really depends on what sort of games you like. There are games on there that are popular that didn’t particularly rub me the right way (e.g. Dota 2 is popular, but realistically should be played multiplayer, which I don’t want to do. Ori and the Blind Forest is pretty, but didn’t grab my personal interest). But…they might be exactly what you’re looking for.

Also can i get a recommendation about using mame emulators.

MAME is a particular emulator, which emulates many different types of hardware. There are a number of different frontends to it — setting up MAME manually takes a bit of work, though it’s how I’ve used it — but I’m not sure what you’re asking. If you just want recommendations for an emulator and not specifically MAME, then maybe list a system that you’d like to emulate (e.g. Super Nintendo, or whatever). If you want a frontend recommendation, I haven’t used other frontends myself, though you might get recommendations from others. If you want a recommendation as to games for older systems that you could run emulated in MAME, that’s another possibility, but again, I think I’d ask what sort of games you’ve enjoyed or a genre or something.