With steam+proton you can almost just buy whatever; but it does help to check the db before you pay.

For those who are not (always) on steam there's also the original wine:

https://appdb.winehq.org/

> With steam+proton you can almost just buy whatever

Unless you don't have a magically compatible hardware setup. On my laptop like half my Steam library won't start, only shows a black screen or crashes instantly. Not even all official Linux releases reliably work. The last time I tried Ubuntu I couldn't even install Steam out of the box. Yes, Steam+Proton has improved the situation immensely. It's still a different kind of experience than on Windows, though.

I just went the console route. Not perfect, but I like that it basically guarantees the hardware will be compatible with new games for 5+ years. The slightly better visuals aren't worth it to me, most games look good enough nowadays (or rather, the best-looking games tend to not be the most enjoyable ones on average).

Hilariously, NixOS actually gets steam set up perfectly every time, all the time.

Of course this presupposes you got NixOS set up at all in the first place. And I'm not ENTIRELY sure I'd recommend it for your daily driver. But a friend of mine talked me into it all; and despite the warts at times it just seems like it's the least worst distro (to praise it with faint damns)

There are some massive, incredibly fiddly consequences of using NixOS to run Steam games via Proton. A lot of stuff works, a lot of other stuff is a royal pain the ass.

I moved to flatpak for Steam on NixOS and couldn't be happier, except now the latest proton uses flatpak under the hood and flatpak doesn't support nested containers.

I hear the flatpak-based Proton works much better (and that makes sense) but I still have some titles that are broken with it but work with older versions.