I recently finished the latest iteration of a gaming PC and haven’t even bothered installing windows on it. Not Mac but it seems that Linux gaming is also basically Windows gaming at this point. It could probably play games on Ultra vs High if I used Windows but ads in the menu bar is a bridge too far for me.
Linux gaming is absolutely incredible right now. After an essay of several months, however, I recently switched my gaming rig back to Windows 10 for three reasons alone: the multiplayer game I mainly play with my buds is one of the very, very few that won’t work on Linux due to anti-cheat shenanigans, Steam Big Screen has a persistent bug with Nvidia cards even as of 560.x, and I could never quite get Sunshine + Moonlight streaming (essential for playing games with the kids around the house) working without micro-stutters. I fully expect 2 of those to be solved within the next few months (doubtless someone more proficient with Linux could solve them in an afternoon).
Very excited for SteamOS general availability for desktops. Owning a Steam Deck has made me really appreciate an immutable OS - especially for a gaming rig, which I don’t want to spend time maintaining.
Edit: As an aside, I’ll just add that for anyone interested in streaming, Steam Remote Play has quietly gone from being an also-ran, to genuinely excellent in the last couple of years. It requires - in my case at least - a lot less tinkering than S+M and produces an extremely low-latency, high quality feed.
So I actually tend to prefer couch gaming and I stream to a MacBook pretty often with Steam. Got an Xbox controller and the latency is basically 0. If you really want max quality, or you’re playing competitive fps games it’s not going to work but for single player games it’s been great.
Linux gaming is actually significantly better than Mac gaming at the moment, in large part due to Valve. The GPU support is way better / faster and there’s less emulation overhead involved.
Proton (custom WINE by valve) is so good now thanks to Vulkan, you generally only lose about 5% performance compared to Windows, with a 10% difference in rare cases.
It's very easy to be a hardcore gamer on Linux now, outside of a handful of online games that gave yet to flip the switch to let their anti-cheat run on Linux.
My gaming box (which I stream PC and retro games from to a handheld and the TV) is a Ryzen 7 APU running Bazzite. I have zero plans for ever running Steam on Windows ever again.
