It all depends on games you play. Talking about singleplayer: a good mount of games run natively and those which don't usually can be played with Proton. Valve did a great job and nowadays you can run almost anything (although once in a while a little bit of tinkering is required). The only problem that you can stumble upon is unticheat. Basically just check if your favourite games are playable or not here and than decide whether linux gaming is for you.
I'm no hardcore gamer but game a lot.
I'm running Nobara KDE, almost any games I throw at it work with no tinkering. Just this afternoon I installed Lies of P demo from Steam, it worked OTT with zero glitch. I have a SSD with Win11 I haven't run in months lol.
I used to dual boot Linux & Windows, but these days, gaming on Linux works just fine. Granted, I don't play any hardcore multiplayer games that might have iffy anticheat or anything, but even modern games work with little to no issue.
Oh yes, there are gamers. I play Apex, Titanfall 2, Hunt Showdown. Sometimes Overwatch.
Very few games have not worked at all. R6Siege is a popular stickler that still doesn't work (even though it could if the devs let it, it starts up and runs training just fine).
I completely switched to Linux in 2015. I'd definitely call myself a gamer. I don't buy AAA games at release too often, but I sometimes do. I play games for several hours a week. So yeah, probably that makes me a gamer. Nowadays gaming on Linux works great 80-90% of the time. Proton on Steam has massively improved the experience. The only stuff that still regularly causes problems are anti-cheat systems for some multiplayer games. Otherwise gaming on Linux feels almost the same as on Windows.
I am both. And I have to say while many games with steam are download and play depending on your system os and gpu you will have various degrees of tinkering in order to get stuff running.
You either have to accept that you can't play every game or spend a lot of time getting them to work.
And multiplayer anti cheat games are very few that work.
I play on linux smfrom 5 years more or less, as it is my daily driver. I have a laptop with nvidia gpu and woth OopOS I have no problem. Stema for steam games, heroic for epic and gog and lutris for all the other. I play exclusively single player, if a need some multiplayer games I have a dual bot, but I used it like 2 times in 5 years. For now the only game that gave me a lot of truble was Shadow of the Tomb Raider from Epic. I had to use "alternative way" for having it to start.
Seems pretty great to me. Yes, it is and will probably always be at least a bit worse than on windows, but definitely not enough to actually use windows. I'm really happy with the way it's going. The enjoyment linux brings for me FAR outweighs the cons. That is not gonna be the case for everyone and that's fine too.
I fully switched to Linux ~3 years ago and at the beginning I was worrying about compatibility, but nowadays I don't really have to think about it anymore. I play AA games almost daily with both Steam and Heroic. Like others have mentioned, there are some games that doesn't work because of anti-cheats, but I think there are only a handful of those anymore.
I recommend using an AMD CPU and GPU, but otherwise you can just assume a game works and it will most of the time. If it doesn't, there might be some quick fixes, and if not then it's an unlucky one.
I’ve been gaming on Linux since Proton first launched. It was good back then, and at this point I can play just about everything in my Steam library (nearly 1000 games). From indies to racing sims to triple a games. It’s great.
Anti-cheat is still hit or miss, but I don’t really play any multiplayer games, so that doesn’t affect me luckily.
I switched near Windows 11 release. I went with Ubuntu hirsute hippo. I had an Nividia card and a steam account and was shocked at how well my games were running. And it has gotten better and better.
My path to Linux was similar to yours, except I dealt with Windows 11 for about 6 months before I finally formatted it and replaced it with Pop!_OS in a 1am rage after it completely fucked up for the 87th time that day.
I was shocked to discover that it was even easier to deal with than Windows 11. The last time I used Linux was a decade ago and it was nowhere near as plug-and-play as it is now. Games worked seamlessly. It completely blew me away.
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