I completed Fallout 3 a few months ago on Ubuntu 20 under Proton (and Fallout: New Vegas). Try using Lutris's implementation of wine ± proton -- my GOG copy "just worked", much to my surprise. Including the mods, and mod managers!

If you continue to have trouble, drop me an email and I'll give you my configuration.

I very much second your sentiment about proton being "good enough". It's amazing! I have a less than stellar GPU -- a Radeon 570 -- and haven't found a single game that I can't play on 'ultra' settings at 1080p, including the in-development BG3.

After Apple's CSAM awfulness, my next laptop will be linux, ideally with a Zen processor, quite possibly running Manjaro and either KDE or i3.

There's only one ThinkPad with Ryzen that comes preloaded with Linux last I checked, but I'm hoping more come out soon since I really like ThinkPads. Either way, ThinkPads are worth a look since they play well with Linux, whether they come with Linux preloaded or not.

I'm also in the market (to replace my MacBook-esque XPS 13 Developer Edition), so if someone wants to suggest me a (other than ThinkPads) 13-14 inch laptop that will play well with Linux [not necessarily preloaded], let me know.

The moves towards getting Ubuntu onto an M1 appear to be moving along quite nicely if you are patient and Apple hardware is of interest.

Not interested. I'm not patient, and I don't want a laptop with just USB-C ports since I find it extremely limiting.

Plus, x86 and mainstream aarch64 hardware feels like it will always be ahead since it isn't a reverse engineered effort.

You've checked out system76's offerings? They're not 4k, but otherwise they seem nice.

Don't like their rebadged Clevo hardware (I know they put a lot more effort than that, and I appreciate it, but the look is not for me). Other than that, IIRC they just came out with a Ryzen laptop and it's too big for my taste.

They don't offer any choice in keyboard layout -- and I don't use en-us. Would love to support them, but until that changes...

Don't feel bad - Fallout 3 (atleast from Steam) no longer works on Windows 10 either! Installed it the other day, googled after it failed to launch, and saw there's a few community efforts and hacks you can try to get it up and running. I gave up.

Yes I am aware. Even before Proton I was one of those geeks with one Radeon for a Windows VM and one cheap GPU for the host system.

But it's just too much hassle. I'd rather just boot up my big Windows gaming rig. I view it as a modular Xbox that I build myself.

So no matter how far we come in Linux, most people will still have a "Wintendo" PC console for gaming.

I would like to but the performance is a dealbreaker. If I'm on windows, I can expect to run latest titles at 60 fps on my 4 year old rig. That isn't possible on wine/proton.

Provided some garbage from either Microsoft or your hardware vendor isn’t sucking up all the I/O or CPU which has consistently been my experience the last few times I’ve suffered Windows.

This has never happened to me.