I grew up on RuneScape and BBC programming, so I’ve been exposed to both formats for a long time (really fucked me up in spelling). I couldn’t say why August 9th sounds more natural, but it’s probably because most irl folks around me use it. The 9th of August didn’t sound bad, just more artificial, and it’s probably because my exposure to that spoken out was mostly media and pop culture.
When you pirate on Linux it’s up to you to make sure you are running it in a compatible environment. Checking protonDB and other sources may show you some workarounds you will need. The other way to do this is to open the game in a terminal, try to run it, look for errors or missing .so files or other things in the terminal output, and use that as a starting point to figure out where you need to go to get it configured the rest of the way.
Lutris scripts and the like do not use pirated sources on purpose, so you are very much on your own with it.