FWIW, with minor exception, Linux is better at "no fiddly shit on my game machine" now. I feel strongly about this too, to come home from work and debug some shit going wrong on my gaming system is no bueno, I'd rather just not play games. It has to work without fucking around.

Windows is now the OS that fucks with me and causes grief, since moving to cachyos the experience has been so bloody blissful it's not funny. I can, amazingly, just come home and launch a game and play the game and not deal with bullshit like taking 30 minutes to install some random update. Nothing randomly breaks. Nothing updates unless I let it. Nothing randomly pops up asking me to do some bullshit I'm not interested in for a result I don't care about. etc.

I mean this is sort of true in that windows is constantly introducing trash, but I've run into all kinds of nonsense:

1. Amd HDMI 2.1 fiasco and adapter workarounds -> debugged the adapter compared to the displayport spec pdf, emailed the company, got a firmware update, patched my kernel. Fixed! This one is going away for good with FRL support upstream soon.

2. Game stops responding to controller input after playing for a bit. Debugged, turns out the service for doing something fancy with shaders has shared fate with the steam input process. It launches a zillion threads and OOMs from virtual memory exhaustion which takes out steam input; fixed by adding a wrapper script for steam that reduces thread stack sizes to the windows default size.

3. Xbox elite series 2 controller back buttons not supported in 2.4ghz wireless mode; reverse engineered the USB packets, contributed support to out of tree xone driver.

4. Flydigi controller software not supported on Linux; find random GitHub project that reversed their hidraw protocol. It's got bugs, so fix them and use it.

5. Terrible banding in Silksong. Set up gamescope to apply dithering; this breaks steam input, figure out all sorts of incantations with LD_PRELOAD

But all of these are very much off the beaten path problems, lots of people have fun with normal controllers, no VRR, etc. My steam deck has been just perfect with zero effort, and I assume that's because I'm not treating the system configuration like a puzzle game.