All this anecdata to say, I consider myself pretty okay at using Linux, I "prefer" Linux, but I don't use Linux for gaming. Not unless it makes sense. I play Minecraft on Linux, and FOSS games that were developed on Linux. There's a POWER9 desktop on my desk that runs Linux, and all my professional and hobby work goes there. I love it.
But any commercial games? They go on my old college-days Intel desktop, running Win10. I can do the work to get games running on Linux, but why bother? Like Linus says in that video, when I have time to play video games, I really don't want to pull out a debugger and strace and crap to do more $DAYJOB work.
Not to say I never do that for fun. I do. I've done some work with https://github.com/ptitSeb/box86, and that involves a similar process. But I just frankly don't find doing it to your average Steam game to be very fun. Sometimes the muse strikes, usually it doesn't.
And for your average Linux user, much less your average computer user overall, you can forget about it. IMO, unless you have a strong ideological reason to only use FOSS OSes (and all the power to you!), the reason you use Linux is because it's a vastly superior tool for certain problems.
Playing your average commercial game is not one of them.
I'm also mostly a casual gamer, and only have my "dedicated gaming PC" because it's 7 year old hardware I've replaced with a dedicated "workstation" I bought after getting a job and saving some money.
On all my other hardware, I just run Linux, and I pretty much do the same as you -- most of my games work fine on Linux, a surprising number natively!
Linus brought this up in his video as well, that if you don't really care which games you play, you'll be fine. The problem is there are a few games I like playing or like to play with my local friend circle that just don't work well on Linux.
The problems are really stupid, too, and often not the fault of Linux per se. Garbage like Elder Scrolls Online still relying on a TLS cert signed by a CA that's been almost universally revoked, so the launcher will silently hang on linux. Bypassing this relies on either adding the (revoked for security reasons) CAs to your system's trust chain, or man-in-the-middleing the game process to force the updates regardless of the cert problems.
It's not like I really care that much about this specific game, but it's nice to play every now and again with friends. Maybe my long rambly point is, if you primarily use Linux for other reasons and occasionally play games with it, it's awesome. But if you're the average "PC gamer" whose computer is primarily for gaming, Linux will probably disappoint you.
Look at what you could run in Wine in 2004 and what you had to do to get it working and what you can do now in Proton. It might technically not be "native Linux" but I couldn't care less as long as it works.
>I've used Linux/Unix for 20+ years but I wouldn't recommend it for gaming unless you enjoy debugging Linux software and want to do more of it.
I game a little bit on Linux and have never touched a hex editor to do it. Right now I only have one game where I have to manually download a dll, all the rest I want to play works flawlessly. I only have to enable Proton in Steam and that's it. Yes, they're mostly older games and I still certainly wouldn't recommend Linux for gaming, but there is definitely progress.
Also...
> Like Linus says in that video, when I have time to play video games, I really don't want to pull out a debugger
...Linus is most likely blind to all the issues he may have to get games to work under Windows because he's used to them. I've been playing games on Windows for decades and it was never a plug-and-play experience (...or it was, if you consider the original PnP experience back in the 90s :-P). If games worked perfectly under Windows you wouldn't have sites like pcgamingwiki.
Hell, i remember buying Tomb Raider 2013 back when it was new and having to trace through its registry calls on Windows to get it to work properly because its launcher was broken on my PC at the time. Incidentally that was supposed to be my relaxation time when i went home after work.
(of course i do not expect Linus -or most people- to do the same, they'd most likely just drop it for some other game and wait for a fix - but i had just bought the game and i wanted to play it right then)
In my experience it is rare to have a PC game on Windows play right away without any issues. If anything when it comes to slightly older games on Windows i had to use wrappers like DXVK to get games working properly due to the broken AMD Windows drivers.
At the past i might have written here that if you want a problem-free experience stick with consoles, but judging from videos i see from channels like DigitalFoundry, it seems consoles have a ton of issues nowadays too (it isn't common but i found it amusing that some people seem to jailbreak their Switches to make games work better :-P). And these come with their own issues anyway, personally i wouldn't touch any locked down DRM riddled system anyway.
Not many people have the expertise to do this on windows either(i would expect even fewer). Bear in mind that the developer sells this game as supported on Linux. The main reason is developers understandably don't care for bugs encountered by 2% users, which makes it a completely different discussion.
I agree that Linux use in general requires troubleshooting skill. We shouldn't assume there will never be any issues worth troubleshooting and recommend Linux to novices as a Microsoft killer. We should instead assume problems will happen and therefore a robust restore process is much more valuable to a novice Linux user.
This is why I believe in btrfs that Fedora uses. Imagine having the powerful restore options many Windows computers ship with. Just press a key, go into a menu, select a point in time recovery, restore.
But that said, what I really wanted to say was that I play exclusively on Linux now thanks to Proton and it's amazing. I can play big titles like Witcher 3, RDR2 and more, but I mostly play smaller titles like Oxygen not included, Rimworld and Ostriv.