My personal anecdotal evidence is that many of the games available for Linux on steam are really terrible ports. Gang beasts for example couldn't even find the binary. Once I fixed that, I was lucky to get 5 fps with lowest settings on my 6 core i7 with a Titan x. Yes I had the latest Nvidia drivers. Chivalry medieval warfare was another unplayable performance offender.

This isn't necessarily valve's fault though. It's because the devs will shit out a Linux build without even trying to run it or they just don't care.

Some games work great. Some don't work at all and shouldn't even be listed with Linux support.

I sincerely hope Linux takes off as a viable gaming platform. All the tools and components are there. The only thing missing at the moment is developer mindshare.

That's completely different to my own experience. In my experience, there tend to be minor issues with graphically intensive games but they mostly work fine with good performance. For example, I'm playing Alien Isolation on a Lenovo Ideapad laptop, with most settings at max, and I'm impressed by how well it runs.

There are some problems and glitches unrelated to the games, in my experience (like how newer nvidia GPUs have screen tearing on Ubuntu -- unrelated to vsync, by the way -- and there's pretty much nothing you can do about it for the time being)

Wine tests are a bad way to compare performance because you can not be sure that all features that the game uses are actually implemented and not stubbed.

https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/11/ars-benchmarks-show-s... Compared to windows .

IIRC that benchmark is garbage, because the compiler they use was so old that Debian Stale had a newer version in their repos, when that article was first published.

Ah, here it is. From https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/3snvpc/steamo...

"took a quick peek at the latest Geekbench executable for Linux(3.3.2,) it was compiled with GCC 4.4.3 on Ubuntu 10.04 - a 5 and a half year old compiler. Windows version was compiled with MSVC 2012 update 4 released 2 years ago."

Take note: That ars article was done ~15 months ago (november 2015). In it, they used Ubuntu 10.04, which was released in April of 2010 (thus '10.04')! Steam wasn't even released on Linux, until nearly 3 years later, in 2013!

That article is so BS that you should ignore it outright. It's not even fit to be toilet paper.

You mean Debian Stable, though perhaps that was intentional? If so, well done.