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)