Playing PC games on Linux through Steam is pretty decent, if imperfect, setup these days.
But I still get tripped up when it comes to the non-PC game stuff. Such as mods, streaming from other platforms (playing my PS5 on my PC), or other community tools that have a tendency to be Windows-focused.
I still haven't been able to pull the trigger on running Linux on my main desktop.
> Such as mods, streaming from other platforms (playing my PS5 on my PC), or other community tools that have a tendency to be Windows-focused.
I have not done mods in a while, but I could have sworn it was as easy as adding it to Steam too, and it detected the game in its "wine" directory. Or something like that? I'm not too sure...
The games themselves run perfectly fine in Wine (Proton), with or without mods. Unfortunately, the fan-made tools to support mods are less reliable.
The most notable example is probably Wabbajack, a tool that manages modpacks for many games but is best known for TES games, where modlists consist of hundreds of mods and are a pain to manually install. Ironically it is a WPF app written in modern C#, so in principle _could_ run under Wine just fine, and could even be ported to a native GUI app via Avalonia UI or similar.
Unfortunately, it is apparently quite fragile in its path management and relies on both Edge WebView to download mods and Windows Steam to install them, so the maintainers think it's not viable to make it run under Wine [0], although of course someone has bashed together a script to work around it [1]. That last one is quite recent so I just discovered it while writing this post!
The biggest issue is certain DRMs aren't supported in Linux yet, but others are, so it's just game dependent. I mostly play single-player, but the multiplayer games I do play work fine.
I don't have Windows on any machines at this point. I've converted everything to Fedora Silverblue and it's fantastic.
Perhaps you included this in your DRM comment, but I think the biggest issue is anti-cheat. Most online games with a sufficiently large 'competitive' element require a kernel-level anti-cheat which won't work on Linux.
My understanding was that EAC works in userspace mode on Linux, instead of at the kernel level. So, you can enable it, and it'll block the most easily detectable of cheats, but it's not very hard to bypass.
Then again, kernel-level anti-cheat is not that hard to bypass with special hardware, either. I guess someone ran the numbers and decided that blocking some percentage of cheaters at the cost of blocking 100% of Linux users was a worthwhile trade.
I have a Steam Deck for my main gaming machine (SteamOS), my laptop is a Framework 13 (AMD), and I have a gaming VM (connected to the TV in my living room) that's running an old GTX 1070 (both Fedora Silverblue).
I have been gaming on Linux for many years, nearly anything I played worked really well, even modern games like cyberpunk or elden ring, for the distro I am using an immutable distro based on atomic fedora called bazzite but I tried fedora and arch and they work as well. I don't think anyone needs windows for gaming.
I've played on Ubuntu / POP_OS! and I've played on Arch, I haven't tried other distros, but anyone else who has Linux and Steam has shared a similar experience with me.
I play all the Bethesda RPG games (TES, Fallout, and now Starfield) I even play online games with friends. Proton does a fantastic job, I think Rust, which I don't play anyway is one game you can't play on Linux due to them not adding support, which its not even an immense effort to support Linux with Proton, you include a DLL if I'm not mistaken.
I've played CyberPunk and other key games as well. Some games on launch are iffy, but after a few updates, they work flawlessly. Like Starfield was almost non-functional on Linux for me, then after a few updates it played flawlessly.
https://protondb.com is a community run database of game support on Linux. Nearly everything modern is supported, and with older games I have found Proton to actually work better than modern windows with some games. Furthermore, games like OpenTTD and OpenRA bring classic games natively to Linux for free. Distro wise, pretty much any of the major ones will work fine for gaming, though it seems Pop_OS is trendy for Vidya. Valve is about to (maybe they already have) release it's modified version of Arch called SteamOS for public use.
