Just a comment on Proton... I've recently shifted to linux (garuda ) as a native OS for gaming (still dual booting, but linux is my main OS now, I used to run linux VMs in windows). My experience with Proton is that only ~30% of my games work out of the box. Some games like dota2, and factorio are native linux and work MUCH better (faster/higher fps) in linux. A bunch of windows games work fine, other's semi work, and I have to spend a bunch of time investigating why I'm getting the issues I'm getting. Others just aren't really supported (it seems anti cheat software is a big blocker) or I just can figure out what is going wrong quick enough that I just abandon it. Overall, everything seems better in linux world, everything is really snappy. I'm hoping more game companies treat linux as a first class citizen as more people switch. It is definitely a great platform for gaming but really just needs game creators to ensure their games work, ideally native, but even just using Proton would be good.

Isn't Garuda an arch distribution? It could be that (less common, so more issues). Running SteamOS likely has better chance of running games, but yeah the linux experience is not streamlined at times (but it is functional!)

What games don't work? I've never had a game I wanted to play but couldn't due to being on Linux.

It's very very rare for me that games don't work. It's almost all competitive games, where the game specifically does not allow anti-cheat.

There's very little fiddling around or configuring. 30% sounds god awful terrible; my success rate definitely >85%. In the rare case something doesn't work right away, https://www.protondb.com/ usually has advice in the top or second comment that works great.

I don't really think the windows vs Linux native debate is worth pursuing. Windows games run better than they do on Windows 4 times out of 5, and that's more than good enough.