All the comments about Linux gaming make me want to give my $0.02. I've been gaming on Linux, with no Windows installed anywhere, for around 6 years. In the first 3 years, it was a massive pain. Games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. would consistently have issues with mouse input, weird acceleration, a lot of games wouldn't run at all. This is NO LONGER the case at all. Things run very well out of the box.

All games I want to play run very well and mostly the process is just "install -> play".

If a game has an aggressive anticheat, like Battlefield 6 or Valorant, it will not work and you can forget about it.

Controllers work fine, so do some wheels and other peripherals, but a good number of wheels, pedals, joysticks, VR headsets, and other wild and wacky input devices might not work that well or not at all. It mostly depends on whether the software for them runs on Linux, runs in Wine, or is needed at all. Not sure about VR, but I know it was a bit dire 1-2 years ago.

If you don't play hardcore simulator games, and don't play one of the competitive shooters with aggressive anticheat (e.g. CS2 and other competitive shooters run perfectly well), you can just install Linux, install Steam or one of the other launchers, and just hit play.

If you're not sure, you can check the status on https://protondb.com.

Well actually I've been technically playing all the games that are protected by these aggressive anticheats on linux since I've decided to switch.

My setup is a custom version of the linux kernel that 'backdoors' itself and exposes host information to the windows vm making all the anticheats happy enough to work out of the box. Have not gotten banned in any of the games either. Custom VMM and EDK builds are required to block blanket detections of virtualized hardware.

I repurposed lookingglass to instead stream all the wdm buffers as seperate applications that I can open directly in linux like they're native applications. The neat part is that I forward all the installed applications to KRunner which talks to the windows vm and launches the application there and spawns a looking glass instance for that applications assigned path.

The only downside that this is a two GPU solution and you have to run any GPU intensive applications in windows.

All games I want to play run very well and mostly the process is just "install -> play".

This is largely true for games running directly through Steam, it can get pretty annoying for games that exist outside Steam.

Especially when you have to do things like apply an ".msi" style patch to a game .

It's doable, but the number of steps and tools you may have to pull in (such as protontricks) does get to be a bit of a pain at times.

For me the biggest surprise was that old ps2 usb racing sim wheel+pedals just worked instantly with linux, and I could use it in dirt rally without any pains. It felt amazing. oculus quest 2 also works very well with alvr, even wirelessly.

> Games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

The old stalker games run on the X-Ray engine (the mods on a modified OSS version of it). In my experience they've always worked pretty well, though the games are quirky in general.

Good hunting stalker.

Related: Wine 11 rewrites how Linux runs Windows games at kernel with massive speed gains https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47507150

Is there a performance hit for cs 2 compared to windows with an rtx card? That‘s pretty much the only thing holding me back.

I have been a happy user of the Bazzite distro (which used proton) for several years at this point. Very happy as well.

And importantly, older games now tend to work better in Linux than they do in Windows.

VR works quite well these days.

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