Saying do it without proton or wine in response is insane, it's like saying "Now do it without your gpu plugged in." They aren't native Linux, but who cares as long as they run well.
The few games with problematic anticheat are a deal issue though.
You don't have to care, but don't expect others not to just because you're OK with a substandard experience. If you're OK eating shit that's fine, but don't trytell me it's chocolate when I'm holding real chocolate.
Proton simply does not deliver a meaningfully substandard experience. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it's worse. I'd bet the majority of steam deck users don't even know what it is.
Most games take a slight performance hit, so small you won't notice unless you're watching the numbers. Some games even have better performance on proton than native windows.
So, if you're really dedicated about playing a game with anticheat that doesn't natively support Linux, and even dual booting isn't an option, virtual machines are. In particular, Linux has a feature neither MacOS nor Windows share called KVM, which essentially lets you loan physical components to the VM, giving it full use of them and cutting them off from the host PC. This lets VMs running on Linux compete on a level equivalent to a similar OS, natively installed on the same hardware, and absolutely smokes the benchmarks of Windows- and MacOS-hosted VMs.
And they can be a pain to set up, but once you get one up and running, there are exactly 3 games on that list that you can't get up and running, Valorant, CS:GO(ESEA) and CS:GO(Faceit). The latter two of which were recently bought out with Saudi blood money, and the former demands a control freak level of access over your PC to even run.
It is personal opinions, not compatibility, that keeps me from playing fortnite (Tim Sweeney will never be forgiven for doing his hardest to kill the Unreal series, and fortnite skins being a source of modern childhood bullying is despicable) with one friendship group and destiny 2 (might actually be a good game if it wasn't designed to be a black hole of money and time that deletes its own back-catalogue of content regularly, Sony pls fire Bungie's incompetent management already) with the another.
Just skip over the part where it's 3 percent of games that don't work, not 40.
Also, please explain how your response makes sense in this conversation:
Person: "Linux gaming has gotten really good lately"
You: "Try it without proton"
(This implies you think there's something wrong with games running on proton even if they're working)
Me: "Why, proton works?"
You: "It's a substandard experience"
Me: "There's a few games it doesn't run, but for the ones it does how is it substandard?"
You: "Games don't run" (this doesn't address your issues with proton, the games that do run only do so because of proton, without it and wine it'd be a million times worse)
Basically every response of yours seems like you're bitter people like something you don't. Literally every gamer acknowledges anticheat is a problem still, there's no point in discussing it here. Nobody's trying to force you to switch to Linux.
If you want to actually discuss the technical merits and downsides of proton, wine, dxvk, etc. I'm happy to, but if you're just going to be bitter about people enjoying things, please seek out a therapist.
Just wanted to add that in my experience, Castlevania lord of shadows was unplayable due to graphical bugs on windows, but flawless through proton (that didn't need any setup btw)
If we're talking about substandard experiences, then Windows overall is definitely one to Linux once you stop trying to treat Linux like Windows-lite and learn to treat it as its own thing.
You don't even have package managers (what smartphone app stores are a pale imitation of), you get motherfucking ads in your start menus, your desktop customisation options are paltry at best and half of them are locked behind a paywall, your OS gobbles RAM and processing power like a stoner with the munchies, it's absolutely littered with baked-in bad decisions from the 90s, hundreds of millions of devices are locked out of future upgrades, and the amount of telemetry built-in could easily be called spyware.
Linux may be difficult to learn and have areas with spotty compatibility, but she'll run on a toaster, is totally free, is infinitely customisable (https://lemmy.world/c/unixporn, alas the subreddit is still bigger but I'm not linking that shit here) and highly modular, answers to you and you alone, and can do an entire system update in the background with a single command. There are many reasons why Linux has pushed Windows out of the supercomputer, server, IoT, smartphone, and now AI fields (and sibling BSD Unix holds sway over mainframes and most console OSes, like the Switch and last three Playstations). Desktop PCs are just about the only place where the Windows marketshare still eclipses Linux.
Cool, well while you're wondering why your toaster doesn't have native drivers I'll continue using the better product. I've used Linux, been using pc's longer than most of the people pushing Linux have been alive. You still won't convince me second tier is first tier.
My sister in Christ, even Microsoft has admitted that Linux can do things their own OS cannot, and now gives all Windows installations the ability to run it in parallel, to the point of rewriting how their own OS works to accommodate it. WSL2 literally runs at the same layer as the Windows NT kernel itself. They've started releasing tools of their own that will not work on a purely Windows system, but require WSL2, in order to even function. All of Azure runs on a Linux backbone. They've made their own distros for internal use. And knowing how hard they are going to push AI with Windows 12, WSL3 might graduate from optional feature to absolutely mandatory part of Windows. All the PCs that can't do the necessary virtualisation were filtered out by the Windows 11 requirements, after all.
This from the company that tried to destroy Linux for years, tried to kill it with UEFI, SecureBoot, FUD and sponsoring lawsuits against the Linux Foundation. Why does your vendetta continue when even theirs has faded and been replaced by a wholehearted embrace?
There's OpenDX, which seems cool, but my understanding is it'd have to be implemented in the game not just on a system, so why bother doing that over Vulkan.
I don't give a fuck about a negligible 117 games, compared to the thousands upon thousands that run in Linux just fine. Posting a pie chart that ignores the existence of those just so it can misleadingly pretend 37% of anything is "broken" on Linux is bordering on bad faith.
Love that they chose to cherrypick the one thing pretty much everyone has talked about being the issue left to fix. Looking at games people actually play, it's like 3%
Gaming for me is mostly fine on Linux, it's running Ableton with standard plug-ins that doesn't work, surprisingly. Basically the only way I can run my own hardware for a music rig is through Windows. Also the odd thing like "run this firmware update utility" for various devices, then you'll have to go forum diving where people have tried all the workarounds to realize the workaround is just "use winblows."
I'm a mixed environment sysadmin for almost 15 years so Windows doesn't bother me as a product as much as others, I don't like Microsoft's business practices, but I can pretty much disable anything I don't like on Windows Enterprise. Like they are compliant with security regulations regarding critical infrastructure, as much as people justifiably rant about privacy concerns they try and force on to end users, but you can get around a lot of that with the same old commands. Our isolated environment isn't sending data to Microsoft or anything from our workstations for instance, and this traffic is heavily monitored and audited.
Gaming for me is mostly fine on Linux, it’s running Ableton with standard plug-ins that doesn’t work, surprisingly.
Considering that Digital Audio Workstation software requires a special low-latency sound subsystem (including kernel support) to work properly, not being able to correctly run a Windows one in WINE doesn't surprise me in the slightest. Bet it'd work if you switched to something like Audacity or Rosegarden, though (assuming you've got all the PulseAudio/JACK/PipeWire stuff I don't understand set up correctly, anyway).
Oh also Linux can be great at audio! I have two raspberry pi based devices specifically dedicated for music which run puredata and supercollider, both synthesis engines. One uses Lua scripts as its presentation and development layer with a Foss community around it, the other is similar but more puredata "patch" based. Incredibly interesting musical applications, so Linux is really at the heart of what I do.
When it comes to recording and "production" though I really rely on Ableton's workflow because it's very conducive to "live" creativity and there is very little in the way to get basic ideas down. And gaming is simpler still on Windows, as are many other mundane tasks that become forum-diving exercises on Linux. The only machine running windows is my main desktop because of this. I work on computer systems all day and at home I just want that machine I don't have to think about and just does what it does. Windows is shitty for many reasons but it fulfills that for me. Laptop and everything else is all Debian all the time, with the exception of my routers and switches. The first computer I ever built when I was 11 was initially Fedora before trying many distros so Linux is truly my first love. Windows is just better at certain things still, sometimes I just wanna be user.
I use Audacity and Reaper as well but Ableton Live is special in how the workflow is, also Ableton does seem to run in Wine, but not VST plug-ins which are key.