I'm on Mint and for 90% of games Proton just works, for 8% there's maybe 15-20 minutes of figuring out which version it works for and two clicks to change it and maybe 2% just don't work, but those games are usually stuck on Game Pass which is locked down like an entire nunnery.

Bazzite. It's really just Fedora with default Steam Game Mode built in. It gets Fedora updates and all. It wasn't my intention to go that way, but I started looking in how to put SteamOS on any old PC and it kept coming up.

So essentially, it boots up just like a Steam Deck into a console-like space. All the Steam stuff works fine in there and if you're all Steam you could fairly easily just use it as a Steam console at that point.

I have much more from GOG, so I go into desktop mode, basically just a Linux desktop and into Lutris, where I can install GOG games. I've done quite a few with a lot of success so far. I even installed an Epic Store freebie game, and while a bit more cumbersome it actually works, and they way it works, EGS runs inside it's own walled garden and only when the game is running. Lutris will link the games to your Steam, so in general all of my gameplay is via the Steam console-like interface. This works with emulators too, but I haven't really tweaked those yet.

I left a Windows 11 dual boot for games that have issues. That was really 75% of the work getting it set up was getting the dual boot right. The only things I've needed that for so far are games that require Xbox app (e.g. the Forza games) and one EA game that I think could be made to work with more effort, I spent a full 10mins on it tops. I've heard the usual suspects for kernel anticheat, like Valorant, won't work in Linux--because Linux doesn't allow kernel access.