I used to religiously read the Wine release entries, looking for fixes and improvements. For me it was an indispensable tool in making Linux more usable. However nowadays (specially in the last 3 years or so) Linux has matured so much that I rarely need it for running applications, most Linux counterparts seem to satisfy me. For games I've also mostly switched to Steam's more convenient method of running Windows games.

Care to share what "Steam's more convenient method of running Windows games" is?

I love Linux, but gaming is the only thing keeping me going back to Linux as my main OS. I heard that Linux can play most steam games except Multiplayer online games due to the anti-cheat software not being designed for windows.

It's completely behind the scenes now. If you have Steam on Linux, there's a setting you enable to allow the "Proton" compatibility layer (Valve's fork of Wine), and all Windows games appear in your library list. That's it. You install and run them like any native game, and aside from a bit longer start up the first time you launch a game, the experience is indistinguishable. I imagine a significant portion of Steam Deck owners have no idea they're not using Windows. I actually wish they would add some badge to a game entry so I can tell what's native, because it's hard to tell.

In some cases, even anti-cheat works. Games that use EasyAntiCheat (EAC) and the devs have enabled linux compatibility and you install the Proton EasyAntiCheat Runtime, you might be good to go. I'm not sure how common it is yet for all those requirements to be met though.

Look at steam deck compatibility as a reference point. The number of games that can run on Linux today is staggering. I tend to assume that games work rather than do not, and that assumption holds about 95% of the time.

For those that use kagi search, you might want to add a custom bang for proton db. https://www.protondb.com/search?q=%s

Kagi uses the same bangs as duckduckgo (and more), so there should already be 4 different bangs for it

https://duckduckgo.com/bangs?q=protondb

Oh nice. Not sure how I missed those.

You hit the nail on the head. Games requiring DRM or anti-cheat probably won't run. Its something Valve has been working on, but its been slow going. Other than that, 99% of the games I've tried have just worked.

Some do

https://areweanticheatyet.com/

old news

> except Multiplayer online games

That's no longer the case. I'd say about now, there are more multiplayer games that you can play, as opposed to ones you can't play.

See: https://areweanticheatyet.com/ as reference, but it's not very up-to-date, so https://www.protondb.com/ would probably be a better reference.

You no longer have to install wine or manually configure games beyond what you would on Windows.

You simply install Steam, and Proton (kind of a fork of Wine) will be installed to provide compatibility for Windows games for you, in a transparent manner.

Proton has greatly increased the compatibility and performance of Windows games on Linux. In some cases, it's faster on Wine than on Windows (in part because some Windows APIs are stubbed on Wine).

Proton DB has the list of Steam games and user reports for how well they are supported under Proton.

Steam uses Proton + Wine under the hood and yeah it works pretty great these days!

Proton is wine + dxvk/vkd3d + more patches.

any advice for switching to Linux?

I think my best tip would be to remain persistent. If you're like me, I can get frustrated easily when I'm proficient with $tool1 and $tool2 can do the same thing but in a different way. It's then easy for me to just go back to $tool1.

For gaming specifically, AMD graphics cards tend have fewer driver problems than Nvidia (though some Nvidia users don't ever run into issues). Commonly recommended distros are Arch (or Arch-based like EndeavourOS), Pop!_OS and Fedora.

That really depends on your requirements, workflow, and the type of PC/hw you're planning to run it on.

But a general advice would be give it a good try first on your real hardware before you switch to it, and approach it with a mindset that this is a completely different operating system, and not everything will work the way it used to in Windows - you may need to ditch some software completely, and change the way you do certain things. If you rely on programs like Wine or Proton you should expect bugs. If you have an nVidia GPU, there's a good chance you'll run into issues or limitations sooner or later.

Only attempt switching if you're prepared to deal with all this, and have tons of patience.

Other than that, a good way to try out Linux would be to install Ventoy[1] on a USB drive, and copy a bunch of different Linux ISOs to it. Ventoy allows you to boot from multiple different ISOs/image files, so you don't need to prepare a different bootable USB every time. Some ISO recommendations: Pop!_OS, Zorin, ElementaryOS, Nobara, Linux Mint

[1]: https://ventoy.net/en/index.html

How and why does one become a diehard windows fan?