Technology

I've gamed on Linux for the past 5 years. If you use Steam, most stuff works out of the box after you enable a single setting. Now that the linux gaming community is growing it's easier to find workarounds for the games that don't work. The only games that are hopelessly broken right now are games with intrusive anti-cheats that don't support Linux. You can head over to protondb.com and check compatibility status for your games, including workarounds when necessary.

If you don't use Steam, then I'm not sure. Last time I played non-Steam games there was more troubleshooting and tweaking required but it's been a couple of years and I don't know the current state. It's worth noting that Valve's compatibility layer, Proton, is open-source and based on other open-source projects. There's work currently being done to port the functionality outside of Steam. Hopefully, this will mean that in the future all launchers will behave similarly.

But that's just the software side of things. Don't forget to check how your hardware works on Linux as well.

Since Valve released the Steam Deck, which runs on Linux, there is an increasing number of games that are compatible. In some cases you can also emulate windows, or just keep it on your computer and use a dual boot system (even tho Microsoft messed up big time with this kind of installation recently)

somehow I guess it's still not common knowledge yet but basically everything that doesn't need a kernel anti cheat will work. or maybe not newer dotnet crap but usually those aren't games. mods and cheats are hit and miss and require some setup, but mostly work anyway. for most games protondb lists what works with and without tinkering but even some of the stuff listed as not working actually does in my experience. pcgamingwiki info is still usefull for a lot fixes to known problems on all platforms.

amd graphics should work out of the box but sometimes the newest cards have issues for a while after release. Any modern distro will not need extra setup as long as the maintainers aren't too far behind.

nvidia requires manual intervention for most distros but some have installers that default to nvidia graphics. expect some jank, there's a lot of weird shit that can go wrong with kernel modules not matching the kernel version among other things.

other hardware can also be problematic and people like myself who have been selecting hardware specifically for linux compatibility may give the idea that nothing is wrong.

I recommend nobara or bazzite for gaming setups that will require little to no addititonal work to play games and most hardware that is possible to work just working out of the box or with a guided config.

If you want to go with a non gaming oriented distro (trust me don't unless you do it on a spare comp or vm for experimentation), then debian, or mint debian, one of the easy arch installers even, but don't do ubuntu. Weird shit will inevitability happen eventually and the old guides and crap ai articles with outdated information from the mail order ubuntu cd days will make it way too confusing to fix unless you are a web search sorceror.

All I do is watch some vids and game. I have only come across one game I can't get to play and it's flight simulator x. If steam says it'll play on steam deck, you're 100% golden. If it says unsupported, do a quick web search for protondb and search the game there. I've played a few that steam said wouldn't work and they do. As far as how well they play, it's been awesome, no complaints. I'm a linux newbie and don't know shit and it's been painless. I did try mint and nobara, and had issues trying to get mint to play games, and nobara worked good but after a week I lost my sound and I liked the way the workspaces works much better with popOs

Only issue I've had is helldivers 2 being slightly finicky and needing to delete the config file occasionally. Otherwise 10/10

I also only game on my home PC and I've been using it for over a year now with Linux. I play CS 2, WOWS and Battletech mainly but check protondb.com for your games. My kids are also using Linux and they also were able to play everything they wanted.

There are a few AAA games with cheat protection that won't work. Other than that: It's awesome and you feel the freedom instantly!

P r o t o n

I don't think it's most yet, but it's improving fast thanks to the Valve Steam Deck. Bazzite is probably the distro to look at for a machine that's primarily for gaming; it's based on the Steam Deck OS, but works on more machines. There are some high-profile games like Fortnite that won't run on it, but a lot of stuff will, especially if it doesn't rely on any fancy anti-cheat stuff.

It depends on the games

Do you play older or newer games? Do you play competitively?

Either way you should checkout protondb

It's a complex issue and kind of depends on your games and your hardware and your software. In general, you can definitely count out major competitive multiplayer titles that rely on aggressive kernel-level anti-cheat software, since that is essentially spyware and it's incompatible with Linux. Furthermore, very new titles often pose problems, as the primary target audience is always Windows. Linux compatibility is seldom considered by big publishers, and as such the FOSS community has to pick up the slack. With the release of the Steam Deck, Valve released a custom version of Wine called Proton, which acts as a compatibility layer between Windows and Linux specifically for Steam Games, but even that kind of is hit and miss. There's a website called protondb that is trying to categorize game compatibility but even good rankings (gold / diamond) usually require some small amount of fiddling with settings.

Overall, if you want to have a single-click to launch games experience, you're sadly still bound to Windows most of the time. But if you have the patience to experiment and learn new things, there's way more tools and possibilities than ever before. Just be prepared to troubleshoot some things.