You can still game on Linux, Steam is phenomenal. ;) I havent gone back to Windows.
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.
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 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!
[0] https://github.com/wabbajack-tools/wabbajack/issues/2521
[1] https://github.com/Omni-guides/Wabbajack-Modlist-Linux/blob/...
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.
Vanguard doesn't work, and perhaps that's for the best.
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.
What do you do graphics card-wise?
This lists the compatibility of most games on steam with Linux - you just need to enable proton in steam and you're good to go.
Any distro should work - distros really don't matter (or if they actually do for you, you're computer-literate enough to not need to ask)
A few of the far cry games worked as well.
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.