No. Not anymore. Haven't encountered a single game yet that doesn't run either via Steam or Wine. Games that require Secure Boot won't work and not all anti-cheats work but Battle Eye and Easy Anticheat for example work under Linux. Valve has done incredible work and it only gets better.
Also CachyOS in general is significantly faster than W10 and especially W11.
Wine/Proton are far from perfect. Many games, particularly ones that are graphically demanding, will randomly crash while running on Wine/Proton, much more so than they would while running in Windows.
As others have said, this is highly dependent on which genres you like; most issues involve anti-cheat unless the game specifically includes Linux, like Arc Raiders does.
That said, if you want to get a high level view of how your own steam library will fare, go to protondb.com, make an account, and link it to your steam account. This will add a 'personal library' entry to the front page, which will show a breakdown indicating what kind of success you'll have.
For me, I've had the hardest time with older windows games. I still haven't gotten Civ3 to run in an acceptable way under Wine/Proton, but every other Civ title works just fine. Thankfully these older titles also run great in a virtual machine.
Overall, very happy with the switch. My computer feels so much less annoying now. Went with Mint due to prior experience, but agree CachyOS would be a great bet for a gaming rig.
dont have linux myself yet, but apps like wine/proton are able to run a lot of games on linux, just everything what needs kernel level access for anti cheat software doesnt work there.
Switch to Linux. I'm using CachyOS and it works better than W10 ever did. Dualboot W10 for everything that doesn't work under Linux and you're set.
Isnt getting games to run a major pain outside of windows?
No. Not anymore. Haven't encountered a single game yet that doesn't run either via Steam or Wine. Games that require Secure Boot won't work and not all anti-cheats work but Battle Eye and Easy Anticheat for example work under Linux. Valve has done incredible work and it only gets better.
Also CachyOS in general is significantly faster than W10 and especially W11.
Wine/Proton are far from perfect. Many games, particularly ones that are graphically demanding, will randomly crash while running on Wine/Proton, much more so than they would while running in Windows.
Haven't experienced any of that with an AMD GPU.
Boot-access anti-cheat shouldn't exist, anyways, so not "being able" to play things you shouldn't be using anyways isn't really a loss.
What about modding games?
Also works. You install them via Wine if they're installed with an .exe. Drag and drop is business as usual.
As others have said, this is highly dependent on which genres you like; most issues involve anti-cheat unless the game specifically includes Linux, like Arc Raiders does.
That said, if you want to get a high level view of how your own steam library will fare, go to protondb.com, make an account, and link it to your steam account. This will add a 'personal library' entry to the front page, which will show a breakdown indicating what kind of success you'll have.
For me, I've had the hardest time with older windows games. I still haven't gotten Civ3 to run in an acceptable way under Wine/Proton, but every other Civ title works just fine. Thankfully these older titles also run great in a virtual machine.
Overall, very happy with the switch. My computer feels so much less annoying now. Went with Mint due to prior experience, but agree CachyOS would be a great bet for a gaming rig.
dont have linux myself yet, but apps like wine/proton are able to run a lot of games on linux, just everything what needs kernel level access for anti cheat software doesnt work there.