Ill keep it as short as possible, apologies if i keep rambling(ill put my specs at the bottom)
Over the last yew years, i have used quite a lot of distros, from mint (currently my main again), to manjaro to solus to endeavouros and more i cant remember, one thing they all (minus solus) had in commong (for me) was the fact that pc gaming...was horrible on them.
Many hours where spend getting different games to work, or rather trying to get them to work at all, most of them had failed, steam, lutris, default wine, no matter what has been used)
As an example:
Anno 1404 history edition (best anno, fite me), i bought it on steam, tried launching it, didnt work, tried several proton versions, didnt work, lutris, didnt work, i downloaded a crack to see, didnt work either, using a different file format, nothing.
Sometimes i was able to make it work, once and than never again, solus was the only one where anno 1404 worked out of the box, i managed to make it work in endeavouros once by installing two packages i could never find again. (most recently, i bought space marine 2, didnt work and keeps crashing no matter what i do9
But this was the best case scenario, games really work.
Is it just my hardware?
Am i using linux just wrongly for years?
Is it my fault?
Am i missing something?
My specs:
prebuilt desktop: Acer Nitro N50-620
memory 64KiB BIOS
memory 32GiB System Memory
memory 16GiB DIMM DDR4 Synchronous 26
memory 8GiB DIMM DDR4 Synchronous 320
memory 8GiB DIMM DDR4 Synchronous 320
processor 11th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-
bridge Intel Corporation
display TU116 [GeForce GTX 1660 SUPER]
storage Micron_2210_MTFDHBA1T0QFD
bus Tiger Lake-H USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 x
network Tiger Lake PCH CNVi WiFi
bus Tiger Lake-H Serial IO I2C Con
It's better today than it was a year ago, and WAY better than it was 3 years ago, and is still improving. There are a few categories of games where you are likely to have problems though.
I would say whether linux is ready for (windows) gaming depends on is different per person predicated on:
For me, I tend to play some older games, and there are a few that don't work well. I don't want to boot windows, so I just decide I can wait for it to get there for them.
For some people, "ready" means will run every windows program as if running on windows. We're still a ways off from that, if we ever get there (it's a moving target, as windows is still being developed...)
I havent played much of any multiplayers games in years actually (does honkai star rial count?
for old games, most vividly i can remember having some trouble with dawn of war so i used soulstorm and a mod to play the og campaign in it
i tend to stay away from triple a games, one of which is because they dont play nice with linux, space marine 2 is a different case for me cause, well, i really like the universe (boltgun worked for the msot part so that was nice)
game categories: well, i dont have too many category i stay away from, but
favourite older games: advance wars series, age of mythology (retold i tried but doesnt work for me either), castlevania aria of sorrow/SOTN, elite beat agents, pepsiman, orcs and elves, punch out wii, katamari series, ace attorney trilogy, dawn of war
favourite never/ish games: hyrule warriors, lego lord of the rings, boltgun, kingdom hearts BBS, patapon