Many single player games work out of the box in Steam, because they’ve invested a huge amount of effort into Proton (their compatibility layer).

Here are some games that have worked pretty well out of the box:

- Factorio

- Arc: Raiders

- Overwatch

- Age of Empires 2 DE

- Abiotic Factor

- Subnautica 2

- Windblown

- Dune Awakening

- Cybperpunk 2077

- Star Citizen (with the community installer to help set it up)

See here for a database: https://www.protondb.com/

The main asterisk is that if you use newer GPUs, you’ll need to use a newer kernel / drivers to get solid support (which is why Arch (& CachyOS) is a popular gaming distro). And certain technologies may not be supported for a while, or take some time to set up (ray tracing, DLSS, frame gen type stuff etc.)

Performance is comparable to windows, and sometimes better because windows is a bloated piece of shit. Lol.

A lot of stuff you can try and it works ok, but the main things that are permanently unsupported are kernel-level anti-cheat (like Valorant) or online games with anticheat that will detect something weird in the setup and ban you. But some competitive games work fine (like overwatch)

It works most of the time.

If "works most of the time" is acceptable for you, it's good enough.

If you actually want to be able to play whatever you want to play - instead of what runs - you have to either stay on Windows, or have it as second system.

Wine has evolved a lot, but there's an entire community dedicated to improving games specifically building Proton, essentially a Wine fork focused on games, including big contributions from Valve.

This has made many old and modern games playable without issues. On Steam or Heroic Launcher, running a game has mostly become as simple clicking install and later play.

That being said, it's not all peachy. There's not really been much progress on native Linux gaming outside of Flatpak/Steam Linux runtime. Many native games run worse or with issues.

And Proton/Wine isn't perfect. Many games need tweaks or may not work without glitches. And games with anticheat don't work more often than they do, on purpose.

Still, depending on what games you play and hardware you own it has become entirely possible to ditch Windows and not suffer for it.

I don’t play multiplayer stuff like Fortnite or Call of Duty, so I might not be your typical user. I use Steam for everything, as well.

But I fully switched to Fedora a while ago because every game I played was either just as performant or ran better on Linux. It’s plug and play, too. I just downloaded Steam and that was it.

I know there are other commenters saying the same thing, but I’m just super excited because of what this means for Linux market share on consumer machines

PC gaming on linux these days is joy these days. The main games you're likely to struggle with are games that require some windows kernel level anti-cheat software running, so some online multi-player will not be playable for that reason. Proton, wine, and the ecosystem have evolved a lot in the last couple years to the point that I'm surprised when a game can not run on linux. Occasionally, you need to look at https://www.protondb.com/ to see if there is some startup option that needs to be added to get the game to run. If you're into single player games, Linux is generally a really solid choice.

In the last few years, Valve has made incredible progress with their equivalent set of API wrappers to what Wine does. Apparently (not experienced first hand) it’s like 97% of the way there, now.

if you have a steam account, and you open it on Linux most of your games will be present to be played. Most of them will just work. Those that don't you can look up details on protondb.com.

as mentioned above if you play any competitive games that come with anti-cheat features, then you won't be able to join in the fun. So if you don't care about those games, you'll be fine.

In short, it is the default assumption that a game will play on Linux these days, vs. assuming it won't.

Steam/Valve has built Proton, which I believe is a fork of Wine, and put significant resources into it. Steam distributes it on its own but CachyOS distributes even more patched/optimized versions of it in their repositories.

The games I know do NOT work on Linux are usually online multiplayer competitive games which have kernel-level anti-cheat. Notable for me is Fortnite - though I hear that now, there are even options for enabling strong anti-cheat in Linux but Epic chooses not to support it.

I'm not informed on other niche game types like simulators or games requiring special equipment, but chances are if it's not competitive, or it's single player, you can get it running with good performance on Linux with modern hardware.