A few weeks ago, I installed linux (Nobara, if you're curious) on my PC and hooked it up to the living room TV to use as a gaming console. I have absolutely no regret. I did it initially because apparently playing games on a shared screen is better for my kid. But I was pleasantly surprised by how smoothly Windows only games run on Linux. The whole experience has been great, and I don't think I'll ever go back. I have an nvidia gpu as well, which apparently does not work very well on Linux. For me, on Nobara, it's been working flawlessly.

The most annoying thing I encountered was the Switch controller support being rather poor. Every button press was somehow interpreted as two different buttons at the same time and I had to figure out which commands to run on Terminal to stop it from happening. Even then, the bluetooth connection on my PC was so bad that I had to stay within 3 feet lest the controller disconnects. I don't really think this is a Linux issue per se, but I recommend people buy a couple of 8bitdo controllers on Amazon which come with USB dongles if they want to go this route.

I will miss games that I can only play with mouse and keyboard, but I think there are enough games out there with controller support that this is not going to be an issue.

Keyboard & mouse user here. To lessen the pain, I moved to gyro-based gaming. I think 8bitdo has those. I specifically use the Switch joycons. I recommend you just get yourself a good BT dongle.

NVIDIA driver progress has been massive over the past year, I wouldn’t consider it much less stable/supported than AMD cards.

I use an 8bitdo controller and they work very good in linux, I use the dongle instead of the bluetooh connection

The Steam Controller will be such a blessing when it comes out.