My subjective feeling is that the snappiness is better in Windows than Linux and MacOS. I think that the pure desktop experience (moving & resizing windows, graphics, font rendering, login/logout, shortcuts, etc) is still unbeatable on Windows. What has gone downhill for Windows is the changes due to mobile & tablet adaptions and the cloud integration (Microsoft account vs local account etc).
I needed to install more up to date graphic libraries thru a PPA to avoid artifacts and weird rendering for a Steam installed game (Crusader Kings 3). Lutris is great, but to my understanding you need to manually install dxvk to get the best performance (someone can correct me on that (and Wine 6 broke a lot of things)). Also make sure you are running the correct gfx kernel module or otherwise hack your grub file.
Yes, you can disable swap entirely and hope it doesn't affect stability. By default Ubuntu creates a 2GB swap file, but if you are on a 16GB machine (not an unusual setup for a desktop computer) that can fill up pretty quickly and Linux will go into a swapping frenzy. You can't even ssh into the machine, just hard reboot or hope it recovers this hour.
When this happens the first time, it is not obvious that it is the swap file that is at blame for what happened. I'm not sure if it even exist a GUI for chaining the swap file size in Gnome (Disks app maybe?). But if you manage to change the swap file size, you have to decide, can I turn it off and hope nothing breaks or should increase it to match whatever RAM or more. It is weird that a desktop operating system ships with a feature that doesn't work.
So I haven't gone out of the way to install a compositor (are you talking a wayland compositor, or the older Compiz type stuff)?
But I have 2x1440p and 1x1080p and I've not noticed any perf issues, which I assume is what you're highlighting as the downside?
And I use all three major desktop OSes daily, so it's not that there's some blazing fast responsiveness to be had on Windows or OS X I'm unaware of.
> If your game doesn’t run well, just add this unknown PPA that will installs nightly compiled graphics libraries (who wouldn’t?).
This feels like five years out of date. Just pick a compatibility tool dropdown in Steam for most people. Lutris if you want something open source.
> And if your computer freezes mid game, sorry you didn’t change the virtual memory size before because it is a fixed size. Tough luck.
I haven't had a swap partition in years, and not once has it lead to a game crash.