If it's not "any game of a list of 200 and it must run without effort", then most games can be made to work either with a certain version of Wine and winetricks settings, or with a certain version of Proton, and there are many things to consider trying.

I once couldn't play X-Wing Alliance under FreeBSD because of joystick not being visible, so I went as far as patching Wine's winmm (I think) to make it work, and carrying that patch around when upgrading Wine or installing someplace new. Glad to report that now one doesn't need it.

That's more than most things require, and some can't be made work with just one simple patch, but the point is - a lot of games work.

And once you've made it work, no additional effort is needed. Just having, maybe, a script setting the right environment variables and launching the game.

A lot of games will just run.

It's not PoS. At its core Windows NT is very cool, and the Windows subsystem for it is not terrible.

What's PoS is that the only way you get it is with such a heap of garbage, that you can't see the good parts behind it.

And even its developers seem to have forgotten those good parts, I wonder if they ever change anything there other than "closing" vulnerabilities with yet another condition in some long-long switch ... case ... statements.

FreeBSD has stable ABIs (inside one major version).

Anyway, this is not an answer, NVidia drivers had a binary part and a part compiled during installation for the specific kernel version, that's one possible solution. Linux developers are ideologically against this, yes, and don't want binary drivers to be first-class citizens.

What games? Even games with EasyAntiCheat work in Linux nowadays, but it depends on the devs.

Adding to what the others were saying, proton has an unaffiliated website for reporting purposes, protondb.com. It tallies user reports of the games working or not. The data is associated mostly with steam libraries.

I don't have a lot of games in my steam library, relatively speaking, barely over 100. But there are zero games that would not work on Linux for me:

In this context Platinum means it works out of the box, Gold means some users experienced minor issues (mostly older reports by nvidia users) that required some tinkering with launch options, such as setting an environment variable. Silver and Bronze mean gradually more tinkering required but still works. This excludes native apps (which do not use wine/proton) and borked apps (of which I own zero).

Note, that this is a translation layer, not emulation, and often games can have better performance under Linux thanks to the system not getting bogged down by the OS itself.

Also note, that 99% borked games are due to kernel level anticheat and DRM being implemented improperly by the game developer, which proton can't handle. You can still make it work under Linux, but you'd actually require emulation for that, instead of proton.

Edit:

Another screenshot of the top50 played saturation to show you what to expect.

For what it's worth, I switched 2 years ago and have yet to run into a game I wanted to play and couldn't. There are some glaring holes, mostly around "serious e-sports" games that have overly invasive anti-cheat (or devs that specifically choose to block linux) that won't work. Riot and Epic both seem to have a hard on for blocking linux users, as an example.

But here's the neat part. You can make the switch and see, and it costs you nothing. If you are in the minority that it just won't work for and have to switch back to windows, you are in the exact same spot you are in now, with nothing lost but a bit of time.

Linux is fantastic for gaming. You’ll even see performance improvements. The only games that have problems are those that intentionally block linux, like Destiny 2, but they’re not worth playing.

The places you are likely to run into problems is with certain desktop apps. For example, the Affinity suite or software designed to support specific devices or peripherals. But if gaming is your focus, Linux is genuinely a better choice than Windows all around.

It's better now but twenty years ago some Linux distros were so insecure out of the box that you could be fully owned if you logged into the wrong network.

Even still, I don't see most distros leverage the security capabilities that running Linux enables. Linux runs the server side of the internet, being a niche os isn't the security silver bullet it once was.

DON'T TURN ON DISPLAYING SECONDS IN THE TASKBAR BECAUSE THAT'LL USE MORE ENERGY!

Quick glance on my installed programs, and I count 7 apps I heavily use in windows 11 with no linux version, nor a clear equivalent that could replace them without extensive hacks that may or may not work and be a total waste of my time.

Also a funny thing: I installed Debian with KDE and then GNOME last year on another PC, and guess what? KDE & GNOME came bloated with a bunch of apps, games, office suite, code editor and other shit.

I thought the whole shtick of Linux/FOSS was that it didn't make any default choices for you. That's what I always read here when people cry about windows bloat.

The same cleanup & customization did for windows 11 I had to do to Debian KDE and then GNOME.

Point is: it's not that easy and being and insufferable jerk about it its not gonna solve it. Let people use what they want.

having to use hacks to get an operating system installed shouldn't be needed.

requiring a Microsoft account to use Windows also shouldn't even have been considered.

There is no particular selling point. That's why they force it.

.

Where’s Microsoft’s Chief Sustainability Officer on this one? Too busy looking the other way on Copilot’s massive energy usage?

OK, thanks for the information, that sounds really interesting. I was playing Doom Eternal and Metro Exodus some time ago, but I made a bread and didn‘t pick it up anymore due to a lack of time. Many years ago I was also trying a bit of Linux on a Netbook (small notebook). By then it was really a different world than Windows.

However, I am not sure how easy that is to manage with getting the right Linux distribution, then Wine, then Proton and then getting all tricks and tweaks right… - I am not a tech expert, so leaving a system that works out of the box is a bit of a hurdle for me.

What would be the best Linux „Distro“ (I guess that‘s how it is called) to start with? I would prefer if I would not have to deal with command line stuff…

You can’t say they’re not. The even have a Chief Sustainability Officer! /s

Installing Linux is a walk in the park whereas windows is a Hilarious clown show from hell with no end.

As a server maybe. Switching everything on my desktop to Linux has been a constant fight against all kinds of problems and there's several things I haven't been able to get working at all. Microsoft's constant enshittification is closing the gap and it's currently a tossup between which one I'm going to land on but that's not Linux improving so much as Windows getting worse.

People keep saying Bazzite now for distro. But as a relatively new linux user (since last summer) I've managed to make things work with Linux Mint, arch and Fedora no hassle.

Heroic launcher (GOG, Epic) or Steam will handle proton&wine for you. Just need to check a check-box in the game's config on whether you want to run native or proton.

Quick glance on my installed programs, and I count 7 apps I heavily use in windows 11 with no linux version, nor a clear equivalent that could replace them without extensive hacks that may or may not work and be a total waste of my time.

if you tell us the names, maybe someone can help

Also a funny thing: I installed Debian with KDE and then GNOME last year on another PC, and guess what? KDE & GNOME came bloated with a bunch of apps, games, office suite, code editor and other shit.

that's the decision of the distribution, not KDE/Gnome. often it is configurable in the installer, even in debian to some level.

The same cleanup & customization did for windows 11 I had to do to Debian KDE and then GNOME.

to be fair if uninstalling unneeded programs is the only thing you do on 11, you're leaving in lots of things.

Let people use what they want.

I agree that insufferable jerks are insufferable jerks, but I don't think most people want to use windows 11, but that's what they can use, for one reason or another, some of which have a solution, some of which not yet. if anything, I would bet money most would rather just stay on 10.

I currently have a modded iPod mini with 128Gb of music, around 1Gb of which was bought from iTunes.

It works perfectly fine. Remarkably so, in fact. Damn things 20 years old, I can plug it into my M2 Macbook and sync music like always.