I have that one linux friend who is always recompiling shaders every game update. It's only 5 minutes, but's it's every game update which can be lot.

I'm waiting for that to go away before I consider the jump. I figure there'll be enough people sick of that behaviour it'll get sorted.

You can just skip the shaders compilation for close to 0 performance impact in most games, I wish they (Valve) would make this the default behavior

If I'm understanding that they're waiting this 5 minutes when they try to launch the game, there's a setting (go to Downloads, scroll down) to do the shader compilation in the background

Go away? I've been replaying Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory (2005) and it recompiles the shaders even on alt-tab (to clarify that feature has been there always since release). It's more on the developers to fix. After all, not even Windows games on winodws are free from shader stutter (with less ways to fix it than linux!)