Battlefield, Call of Duty, Apex Legends, PUBG, Rainbow 6 Siege, Fortnite, Valorant, League of Legends, Teamfight Tactics, GTA5 online (and likely gta6 online).

Personally, only TFT is a blocker for me, and you can get an inferior version working on linux, but it only takes you playing one of those games for it to be a blocker.

How many of these will not run under Wine/Crossover/Hangover?

My guess is that most DRM'ed games won't work right, but they often don't work right under Windows either.

Games "often not working under windows" is cope linux advocates tell themselves to convince themselves there is no reason for anyone to have windows installed. Its more the exception rather than then norm, and is usually the older games where their wine setup could be used on windows for the same effect.

He listed those because they have kernel-level anti-cheat or DRM system that requires Windows/MacOS to run. You cannot WINE them.

> but they often don't work right under Windows either.

This is certainly untrue. Them working often is the entire reason why Windows is the "gaming OS".

It's not the "can't" necessarily, it's about friction, I could get it working on linux, but then I'd probably be just fiddling with settings way longer than I do today.

Current Windows gaming experience is almost like a console, just play and forget, (if you just use your machine for that).

Another potential issue is that I have games in all the major launchers (and a GamePass subscription), and the only one that works reasonably well on Linux is Steam.

I installed Bazzite just last month, it's set-and-forget. Zero hardware / driver issues, everything autoconfigured.

Didn't even need to download steam.

Absolutely shocked me how smooth the out-of-box experience was compared to even Windows 10.

To my further surprise, I found my game library's compatibility on Bazzite was stronger than Windows 10 somehow. (Some old games like Moonbase Commander don't launch on Windows 10)

Agreed - Bazzite is the kind of set-and-forget level of quality I expect for a gaming appliance. I haven’t needed to twiddle with a single setting to get any games I’ve been playing (Stalker 2, Kingdom Come 2, Doom The Dark Ages, Arc Raiders, Helldivers, etc).

FWIW - GOG and Epic games play just fine via the Heroic app on Bazzite. I’ve only played a few games from those platforms so far - but it’s been as seamless as playing games off steam in my experience.

For me the last one was Blade and Soul, and in the end, I dropped it rather than put up with it.

Even live-service games are less of a hassle than they used to be. BDO works well, Genshin works with occasionally having to update Proton, and the new shiny Where Winds Meet worked for me from the first day (never even tried it on Windows :P)

I think in the last 6 months, I've dual-booted for pretty much these things:

* To install a new motherboard's RGB-tweak utility because it doesn't work right in OpenRGB yet. Ran it once to pick settings, then it seemed to write to NVRAM since it's been stuck that way now.

* To use ham radio programming software that was clearly written by a single hobbyist and I didn't expect to work on anything but happy-path Windows systems.

* To try a weird specialty keyboard with a nonstandard card-reader (most of them just appear as normal HID keyboards, this one was a custom USB endpoint which apparently emulated a serial device with the right software. In the end, it didn't work well in Windows either-- the software was apparently mostly Win7-and-below.

* To deal with an old scanner that the vendor provides a Linux software package for, but only as a binary .deb that didn't seem to work well on Void. (Problem solved by picking up a used scanner explicitly supported by SANE for $10 at the Goodwill)