State of gaming on linux?

Orac@feddit.nl to Linux@lemmy.ml – 223 points –

I used linux in the past, both privately and work-related, but the last time was over 10 years ago, so I'm a bit out of touch. I am in need of a new PC, but it'll be a good year before I have the funds, so for now I am making due with an i5 7500 and a gtx 1660. I do have 32 GB so there's that. I finally feel confident enough to make the permanent switch to linux from windows as all of the programs I use are either available on linux or have a good/better equivalent. The only thing I fear will hold me back is games. I know Steam has Proton now which will run most games, but how does it compare? The games I play most are Skyrim (heavily modded) , RDR2, Witcher 3, Transport fever, Civilization, Crusader kings 3 and Cities Skylines (uninstalled atm waiting for 2). I'm on the fence to either wait until I can afford a new PC and dual boot or make the switch now and deal with a few gaming problems. Thing is, what kind of problems may I expect? Anyone able and knowledgeable to give me some advice?

EDIT: Wow, those are a lot of replies; thank you everyone! You really helped me. I will make the switch sooner rather than later.

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Check out https://www.protondb.com, to see which games work well on Linux. Games that are platinum should work out of the box, ones that are Gold might need some tinkering. Most games work great, but a lot of multiplayer games aren't supported.

In general gaming on Linux has been a pretty smooth experience lately. Games on Steam usually just work, but IMO running games outside of Steam is pretty hit or miss. They sometimes need following a guide or trying to fix an obscure issue that only like 2 other people have.

The thing about Linux is that you might have some issues outside of gaming. Things you might not expect like Discord not being able to screenshare audio or that one program you need not working on your distro properly. Also you should know games on an NTFS drive don't work well on Linux, so you can't expect your drive full of Windows games to just work if you have them on a 2nd drive. In general I still think you need some patience if you're going to settle on a Linux desktop, it's not entirely a bug free experience yet.

I'm not the OP, but drat, I didn't know that bit about the NTFS drive not working nice... that was gonna be my plan for my games so I wouldn't have to re-download hundreds of gigabytes of games (Battlefield 1, Borderlands, TF2, Genshin, etc...)

Yeah it's a real pain point. I copied my games to an external drive, reformatted the drive, then put them back and everything worked smoothly then. On the bright side if you can't do this, Steam makes moving games to your Linux drive pretty easy.

What distro?

I'm on Nobara currently, but the NTFS thing is an issue with Linux in general.

NTFS will work, I used it for a few years without even realizing. I eventually switched to EXT4 for my games drive from an old Windows install when I realized ntfs-3g was using a decent amount of CPU and had a small impact on performance.

Does your EXT4 games drive play nice when trying to run the games in Windows?

I'd like to dual boot but the NTFS / EXT compatibility issue remains a concern for me since I would rather not have to redownload everything only to have it not work on one of the OSes.

I don’t boot into Windows often enough so I just reformatted the drive to ext4. When I did use both though NTFS was perfectly usable for both.

My wife switched to Linux recently and we kept her large data hdd as it was (i.e. ntfs) but within a week she discovered several new files had been corrupted, and could neither be opened or deleted. Seemed to be happening when she was using drag and drop in Thunar, while moving files using copy paste worked better. Didn't want to take more risks so we backed everything up and reformatted to ext4.

Oh ok, that's interesting that there would be a performance impact! But that's cool that it does work. I'm honestly more worried now about getting Nvidia to work since that's what my pc has since I'm using sway, but I guess I'll worry about that when the time comes. Thanks!

I run this setup right now and it works very well. The key is to disable fast boot in Windows (preferrably before even installing Linux), otherwise it won't shut down all the way and leave the drive in a dirty state. The ntfs-3g driver will still read and write to it, but games won't work.

Does disabling fast boot make it so when you tell the computer to shutdown it actually shuts down? I found out that shutdown doesn't really shutdown after checking Task Manager and seeing the uptime

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Outside of steam, there are community scripts with Lutris and other alternatives.

But sometimes they don't work well.

There are also ways to play epic games and gog games easily through the Heroic games Launcher and Wine-GE.

(wine and winetricks and 2 other wine components need to be installed).

A bit of a tangent to the discussion but that issue with screensharing audio could perhaps be worked around, by piping the system output to the browser mic input, given that the mic still works when screensharing. Easy with pipewire and an audio I/O graph tool like helvum.

I did that for a while and it does kinda work if you bring your mic threshold way down, but there is a modded client called "discord-screen-audio" which tricks Discord into almost working properly. The one limitation being that you can only stream your main monitor and not another one, or a specific app. But the audio does work!

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It depends. Do you play stuff with kernel level anticheat? If no, then the current state of Linux gaming is, by and large as good as, and occasionally better than, Windows - even on games that don't run natively.

Proton is astounding, and the state of Wine is amazing compared to 10 years ago (and it wasn't bad then). Get Bottles or Play on Linux going, plus Steam, and there's very little you can't do…

Except kernel level anticheat.

(To be 100% transparent, there are other issues. I have a couple games I can't get to run reliability, but they're all obscure edge cases. But like 90% of stuff without anticheat just works at this point.)

Edit: proofreading

EAC works in Proton, as long as the developer takes the time to configure it right.

Isn't it even more or less just a checkbox for them (game developers) to enable? That's what I read when I first heard about it getting Linux compatibility, but maybe it was hyperbole.

Its not exactly a checkbox. Basically, the developer has to choose the right version of the EAC library to include in their build. Older versions didn't support Linux. And with the new library versions there is the "with Linux support" and "without Linux support" varients.

Some games still build with the older version for compatibility reasons, some will stick with the older version for spite reasons. Some games update to the new version but use the non-linux-support new version.

To be fair I could not even get Valorant running on Windows. Anti cheat like that is complete and utter bs and will make me never play any game with it. Just like I don't buy a game until they remove Denuvo.

I wouldn't buy a game that uses Denuvo even if I was running Windows. That stuff's basically malware.

I haven't used proton recently because I replaced my Linux laptop with a Windows one (changed jobs, didn't need it anymore). But when I did play games with Proton a lot, around 2020, I sometimes had issues with cutscenes not showing at all. Just black screens for cutscenes on some games. Did that get fixed?

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protondb.com will tell you how well each game works. There's also an icon on Steam, if it says it's certified for the Steam Deck that's also good.

I've installed Manjaro in 2020 during covid specifically for gaming and never looked back since.

We're living in the golden age of Linux gaming right now, get yourself a piece of it.

If a game doesn't work on linux, I don't buy/play it until it does. End of story. There is plenty of choice and time is limited, so having an extra filter is just helpful.

The only experience I have is with Steam Deck and it's fantastic! I love it so much that I've decided to build my next PC as a Linux only box. I am a refugee from /r/patientgamers though. I don't play the new hotness unless it's first party Nintendo stuff.

I'm also so fed up with Microsoft's anti-consumer practices and disastrous updates, so it makes it an easier decision.

Just a heads up, the steam deck can run switch games, often better that the original hardware. If you own a copy of the game it's legal to emulate on your device however you'd like.

I heard that, but I also heard it's kind of a removed to set up with BIOS or something? I was actually messing with an Arcade Punks iso that had some switch games on it and they worked. Terrible selection other than Mario Kart. So I tried to add another one I own and it won't play. I'll eventually try to figure that out.

The whole reason I kept Windows around was for Genshin Impact. At compete random, the game silently added proton compatibility with their anti cheat, so now I never have to boot into Windows anymore. I was never expecting it to actually happen lol.

Wait, when did that happen?? That's great! I always was playing it with the sneaky secret way that shall not be named lol.

So that's not necessary anymore?

Is there anything wrong with the sneaky way that shall not be named?

Yeah because it patched the game to bypass the anti cheat, which is definitely in violation of ToS. Otherwise you'd be able to name it without fear lol. The anti cheat works now so no need to run it anymore for any risk. You can just play the unmodified game officially without any risk.

Naw, but my spouse is a hardcore player with a ton of time into it and I am only a casual player.

I don't wanna risk an IP ban on our connection and have her have to start using a VPN or worse, have her account banned because it's associated with my account using the secret way to play.

If I do it through proton which is officially supported, that risk goes away.

I actually had issues with proton. I would recommend through Lutris, and then use their wine-proton version. That's how I play the game unmodified and officially.

For me it reached a point where I now expect a new game I'm trying to just work. This was a monumental shift when I first realized that a few months ago.

Your best bet is Steam/Proton, since Valve stands behind it and development on all the Proton components (Wine, DXVK, VKD3D, Gamescope, ...) is very active.

If you get games outside of Steam (I often prefer GoG if that's an option, plus I have some itch.io bundles purchased a while ago), some tinkering may be necessary. For those, I like to go "vanilla" with Wine(-GE-custom usually), plus DXVK or VKD3D on top. There's also Lutris to help with these scenarios. Works great too.

Another topic is native Linux games. There are some gems which work beautifully. I recently finished native Celeste from itch.io and it was flawless. Another great Linux port is Bastion. But some older titles may have compatibility issues - missing or incompatible libraries, broken gamepad support or stuff like that. For those, the Windows version via Proton may actually work better than the native version. Luckily, we can now pick either one.

I'm playing Baldur's Gate 3 since day 1. That's really all I need and a lot more than I expected just a few years ago. It's only gonna get better from here.

Have you heard of ProtonDB? It rates the current state of games and recommended fixes.

Gaming on Linux has improved a lot over the years. It's typically only multiplayer games with Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) that you'll run into major issues with. Mod managers frequently require a fair amount of extra work and reading but I think a lot of Bethesda games have easy work arounds and documentation.

Thanks, I didn't know about ProtonDB. I never play multiplayer so that won't be a problem.

If you never play multiplayer, you're probably fine. Though the only issue with that is triple A games not letting Anti-Cheats work on Linux for whatever reason.

Other then that, you'll only run into issues when modding Skyrim for the most part. Here's a github page with a step-by-step guide on how to do it; although, far as I can tell it's four years old and might be obsolete.

There's also this post in the Steam Community forums which is two years old at the earliest.

For Skyrim I've had pretty good luck with just adding Vortex mod manager as a non steam game, running it with Proton and using mods that way

Just to add to your comment, steamtinkerlaunch is a compatibility tool that allows you to install any mod manager through a GUI. Pretty handy.

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One other website I'd check out if you are getting into any obscure/older games that might not have a lot of comments on ProtonDB is the PCGamingWiki. Lots of fixes are listed there

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@CorrodedCranium

> Mod managers frequently require a fair amount of extra work and reading

That's one complaint I *do* have sense switching to linux, I wish that there was a linux version of vortex (or MO2 or what have you) so that modding can be made relatively simple for more than just a few games that have easy workarounds

I could be wrong but I think there are Lutris install scripts that help with that

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I've played most of those on Linux and they work just fine. Some notes:

  • I've never modded anything on Linux, so I don't know what the experience is like; I imagine there are decent guides though
  • own but haven't played Witcher 3, Transport Fever, or Crusader Kings 3 - CK3 is native Linux, so it should work
  • I've played Civ 3-5 on Linux, haven't tried 6

I've played exclusively on Linux for the last decade, and I've played tons of popular games that all work well. There are only a handful of games that don't work well, and they are either super old (e.g. almost DOS days), multiplayer (mostly anti-cheat), or less popular.

RDR2 runs fantastically on my 6650XT @ 1440p, and I'm guessing it would run acceptably well on your 1660.

So yeah, try it out! Most of my games just work, and the rest only required very minor tweaks (e.g. launch options in Steam or a specific Proton version).

Ironically, I've had more issues with CK3 natively than running through Valves Wine flavour.

When running natively, using the Vulkan renderer it gets stuck initializing, and when using OpenGL it stutters. Using Proton and DXVK it is butter smooth.

Huh, that's pretty lame. I'll have to try it out and see if I have the same experience.

I have noticed that issue on other games though, where DX11 worked better than native.

The same is true for some Feral Interactive games.

For Crusader Kings 3 on my desktop the issue does not exist. Native Vulkan is silky smooth there. On my laptop it only works with native OpenGL or Proton.

Both are AMD machines because fuck Nvidia drivers.

Ah, I wonder if it's an issue switching from integrated graphics to the dGPU then. I have been avoiding dGPUs on laptops for years now because I just didn't want to deal with it on Linux. I ended up getting an AMD laptop for my last laptop (E495) so I could do light gaming, and it's a fantastic Minecraft box now for my kids.

I haven't had major issues when I had an NVIDIA card (had one for ~10 years), but I did recently switch to AMD for my desktop this year and I can finally use Wayland now so my monitors refresh properly.

Vulkan is MUCH better at multi GPU systems btw. Most games default to the dGPU without hacks like DRI_PRIME, or allow you to select one in video settings

If your pc doesn't support vulkan you're fucked, unless you use steam

What does supporting Vulkan entail?

Steam Proton (which does the heavy lifting of running windows games on linux) includes DXVK/D9VK/VK3D3 which translates Windows DirectX games (don't work on Linux) into Vulkan (which works on Linux)

not having Vulkan will result in falling back on the way older DirectX -> OpenGL translation which not many actually care about nowadays and hasn't been opti.ized to run well in years (awful performance)

How do I know if my PC supports Vulkan?

depends on how old your graphics chip is
typically anything newer than 10 year old will support some level of Vulkan

My msi GF63 thin laptop doesn't...

What graphics card do you have? I think you'd have to have a really old card for it to not support Vulkan. Or perhaps integrated graphics might not support it very well, I'm not too knowledgeable on integrated graphics currently.

Vulkan isnt that new though so a 1660 should be fine, right?

I use a 1650ti and it's not supported

1650ti most certainly does support Vulkan. However there may be problems if you have switchable graphics.

Indeed, i have to use optimus manager in X11 in order to let my graphic card process games and other things

Seems pretty okay. I managed to get League of legends/TFT running perfectly fine (though the launcher is a bit stuttery)

CSGO I noticed runs WAY smoother on Linux. Maybe becausw it uses Vulkan which is a lot more modern than dx9. But the aim just feels.. smoother despite the same FPS?

edit: on Nobara and a AMD GPU

Nobara

Fedora

With GloriusEggRoll Taste

NOBARA BORN!

I started using Linux maybe 5 years ago, just before DXVK and proton became a thing. The difference between now and then for gaming is night and day.

If it's on steam, there is a pretty good chance it'll work. If it's not on steam, it still might work through lutris.

There are some holdouts like Riot games, but I haven't owned windows in almost two years.

Better than it's ever been, but it still has room to improve.

protondb.com and winehq.org are your best friends

Can be pain free but it can also be painful. Some things straight up won't work because of anti cheat and unsupportive developers. I'd say give it a try. Gotta bump up the market share so Linux support actually matters in developer business cases.

Sorry if there's a lot of technical terms.

My anecdotal experience is that Skyrim modding under Linux worked surprisingly well. Despite that I think I would still say "YMMV". I have it running under Lutris-GE-Proton8-13.

I used the GOG release because having local access to the installer is a major win. Note that even if you don't install the AE upgrade it's the same version number, 1.6.659 so bear this in mind when installing SKSE64 and mods. I think there's a specific release of SKSE64 for GOG. Many mods label that version as AE only, which isn't true of the GOG release.

I chose to install in Lutris because of how easy it is to manipulate prefixes. I had issues with the automated scripts, which I expected. So I did it myself.

I downloaded Skyrim from GOG and installed Skyrim using the "Install a Windows game from media" option, then run once from the launcher to ensure everything was initialised before modding.

Inside this prefix I installed MO2 using "Run EXE inside WINE prefix".

I chose that mod manager because I used it on Windows and it worked just fine. I don't know a lot about Vortex. There's a DLL to add support for Epic and GOG installs of Skyrim. I duplicated the Skyrim SE runner and changed the target to ModOrganizer dot exe. There's a UI bug that makes reordering mods act weird, just click another mod entry if it gets stuck.

The Nemesis issue I had, which appears to be a Linux/WINE problem - the solution given (Extract it to the Data folder then run the executable from MO2 with VFS) worked for me.

TBH my modlist is pretty tame compared to most that I've come across so I didn't expect many problems. LOOT worked as expected so I just let LOOT handle my load order.

There's probably more to it but this is what I remember. Happy modding!

Modlist

Nemesis issue

Mod Organizer 2

Super useful tool to help manage proton versions

So my current experience is Lutris-GE-Proton8 doesn't work properly with all GOG installers and it just gives black flickering... However I used to have great success with Lutris.

I'm using Pop OS for gaming and work and it works flawlessly. Looking at the game you listed, I think they will work without problems. Give a look at protondb so you can have an idea. However I would suggest you to try it yourself and see how it goes, gaming on Linux is a very different matter compared to ten years ago!

I turned on Proton Experimental in Steam and now I can install Magic Arena on my Pop!_OS box and it works pretty darn well.

Pop! putting in work.

Try Protontricks to run stuff without steam shitting up your system.

I haven't had any problems with Steam shitting up my system. Are there particular things you're concerned about?

it's just a bloated mess, especially with the new UI.

If I don't need a launcher taking up system resources in the background I won't have it.

Oh. Yeah, I use killall steam sometimes.

I am using Pop OS! For my gaming. I haven't booted into windows in a month.

Skyrim with proton GE will work just fine. Modding will be trickier. Vortex can be setup, with lutris. But I've ran into issues when it comes to external programs like resaver, loot, nemesis/fnis.

You could slap in a cheap second drive and see what happens. Compared to 10 years ago, it's so much better.

Cyberpunk, Baldurs Gate 3, Sims 4, Minecraft (not a shocker, just need Java for modded), it's been great.

steamtinkerlaunch makes running Skyrim with ModOrganizer2 very simple. Other external programs will probably still be tricky though

If you use lutris you can simply download portable MO2 version and unpack it to your wine prefix with installed skyrim and it's work perfectly.

Can you elaborate on the modding? I'm also interested in using Linux for gaming but Skyrim utterly demands mods and particularly I quite like mods like Skyrim script extender (I think that was the name) and I also really liked ENBs for the graphical improvement. And Nemesis was also sooooo much better than the alternative for managing all those mods.

I know multiple people that do Skyrim on linux, at least one heavily modded. Outside of DyndoLOD not working right I can’t really remember any issues they had.

If all you want to do is to play retrogames and the occasional AAA+ single-player game? It's perfect and there is no reason to use Windows ever again.

But if you want to play competitive games that require anticheating in order to work...? Then you will gonna have some problems.

Anyone able and knowledgeable to give me some advice?

Duckduckgo "lutris wine dependencies", install lutris, download the latest lutris wine version via lutris launcher, use said wine ver. in any game you want or fallback to your system one. Thats it.

On a very rare occasion do I ever run into a game that doesn't work on Linux, have completely ditched windows about a month ago and haven't looked back

I even get significantly better performance in most games, used to just about manage 60-70fps in overwatch on max settings under windows, now it smashed 170 no problem

Overwatch (and probably AMD's drivers, thinking back) was actually the tipping point for me ditching Windows and fully commiting to Linux. I was getting the dreaded "rendering device lost" crash at least once per gaming session, with a brand new GPU, but have seen it maybe twice since switching. I don't have quite the same performance gains as you, but Overwatch is definitely more stable and just feels smoother on Linux for me.

It might've been because it was so new, think Linux is typically slower to get drivers up and running for newer hardware

I have played modded skyrim on my Linux system, and it worked fine. It was somewhat of a headache to make Vortex work, but once I figured out the quirks, it worked fine (used steamtinkerlaunch as compatibility tool). Civilization too - 5 (with and without EUI) and 6 worked pretty much out of the box via proton. A friend of mine plays RDR2 and also has no issues, doing coop stuff and singleplayer or whatever.

I'd say in terms of your choice of games, you should be fine. Proton runs most games just like windows nowadays, and you get the added benefit of less system load. There might be some games that require a bit of tinkering to get working flawlessly, but chances are some user on protondb has a solution.

If you need a distro, a rolling release one might be your best bet, as having up-to-date packages does help with gaming.

Everyone here is saying it's fantastic and much better compared to 10 years ago, which is completely true.

However, the state of VR gaming is still pretty dire. You can get it working on some hardware setups, but not others, and it's nontrivial to find out what's going wrong. I've lost a couple of days trying to diagnose problems on multiple distros and it just doesn't seem to work for me. It may work for you, but the chances are a lot lower than if you were to just play normal games.

To be fair VR gaming is a sort of stalled niche that will likely never grow much beyond where it currently is if it doesn't die off again completely.

Standalone hardware is where it's at for VR most likely. I say this as someone who resents Meta from acquiring oculus and messing with the fully working and awesome rift

VR is very much not stalled. Is it a niche thing? Oh for sure, but it's still very much being developed. Between all the new hardware and software that's coming out, it'll be a few more years of super niche stuff and then it'll start becoming more mainstream.

As others users have said though, VR on Linux is non trivial to set up and sometimes ill advised. I run dual boot with Mint and W11 strictly for VR support.

then it’ll start becoming more mainstream.

VR will never become mainstream because it is fundamentally incompatible with the way most people use their systems, cutting yourself completely off from your surroundings is not going to work in many situations (e.g. when you need to have half an eye on the kids, need to communicate with other people living in your household, want to look stuff up on another screen while playing,...

And we are still waiting for VR titles that are beyond the 'tech demo' level of usefulness.

I've been having a great experience. I am on an all AMD system, which generally has better support than Nvidia, so ymmv. The only thing I occasionally miss is Xbox game pass, but I didn't use it a ton to be honest so I guess Linux just saved me 15 bucks a month.

Most games I've played have been a literal cakewalk, just install and play. Stuff that uses the ea launcher acts a little strange on launch but has worked fine so far - just have to not panic when you see a blank ea window sit there for like 10-15 seconds and have faith it will move passed it, lol.

The native steam package in most repos seems more than functional(esp with using proton when necessary)
(Archlinux, EndeavourOS, Pop!_OS are ones I've tried with success with a GTX 1080(fuck nvidia))

just tried to use the flatpak version of steam and it seems to have issues with linking external libraries(disks/partitions) and flatpak steam won't let you install any Windows games(as of Aug 8, 2023)

So I swapped to linux again about a month ago and I'm frankly shocked at how much better it is now, especially for gaming. While I don't have first hand experience with the games you listed (in linux), based on the games I have played, I have no doubt those games will all work just fine.

Honestly, I don't see myself going back to Windows at all at this point.

(For the record, I'm on Pop!_OS.)

The only thing that still makes me keep a Windows partition on my computer is Valorant, I want to start playing CounterStrike so I can drop this damn malware game.

I've always wondered but for all the hate Valorant gets, do you feel like their anti-cheat has reduced the amount of cheaters you experience as compared to other games?

FWIW I haven't played much Valorant

Absolutely not, even at my low rank, every now and then I end up falling into a game with hackers. And there's always someone going live on TikTok admittedly using hacks.

I would be keen to hear back on these. I think you will have no problem with Civilisation, but for Skyrim modding, possibly issues especially if you're using an ENB mod.

I've been meaning to try Skyrim but I'm waiting until total conversion mods Skywind and Skyblivion come out.

Don't use ENB with my setup, too much of a strain on fps, so that wouldn't be a setback :)

I can only speak for Witcher 3 of the games you've listed and it plays really great!

I'd say about 95 percent of my steam collection works with little to no tweaking required these days. Skyrim works, throw any mods you want at it. Witcher 3 runs great. RDR2 and any civ 1-6 all run perfectly. Baulders Gate 3 runs smooth as butter.

There's the odd game here and there that doesn't work well or at all but most things just work. I think the main thing that doesn't work is anticheat enabled online games. I don't play those though so I can't really comment on their state of play outside of that.

Any advice for modding? I couldnt get mod organizer to work even close to reliably and enb is also really hit or miss

@hardcoreufo
>any civ 1-6 all run perfectly

Can you give more detail on this? Specifically how if you have any experience getting civ 2 to run? The only way ive managed to get it to run any time in the past few years was through a win 3.11 VM (even modern windows)

Actually more importantly I want destiny of the doctors working (a win 95 game) but I've had no luck so far

I thought I had civ 1 and 2 on steam but I was wrong. My memories of playing civ 2 on Linux were really of freeciv. I find it scratches the civ 2 itch. I've certainly played 3-6 on Linux through steam. Though 3 is a hit of a hassle and not worth it to me when I prefer 2, 4, 5 & 6.

You can just check on protondb if any game you want to play works with Proton or doesn't at all. But generally almost anything that doesn't require an anticheat will work.

I switched to linux before the steam deck came out, and things were already pretty good then, but it's even better now that more folks are invested in it. Since then, I haven't come across any steam games I have major issues with - however, I still have issues getting my controller running (I don't use it often though, so I haven't really looked into that much) and on certain games I have issues if I switch windows while it's running. Generally for me, if it runs, it runs well, aside from occasional issues from needing more ram. It looks like we have similar cpu's, and you have a better graphics card and more ram than me. I can't speak for everything on your list, but I did play some civ fairly recently without any problems. Check protondb for the games you play most before making the switch - and if you're worried, check lower rated games on there for examples of issues and fixes. I suspect it would be fine for you to switch.

I couldn't get RDR2 to play, but I'm also a noob. I have a drive with windows just for playin the games I can't run in linux, and maybe I boot it once a month.

I had no issues running RDR2 personally

I couldn't get to work RDR2 nor Elite Dangerous. But I didn't tweaked anything, just went to install in Heroic Launcher.

In heroic go to game's settings and check "Install DXVK" and "Install VKD3D"

I actually did get it to work and I'm an idiot. Use heroic games launcher if on epic, for some reason it worked better than a pirated copy.

Did you tweak anything? Or just hit the install button?

Outside the few games like valorant and destiny 2, literally everything else I've tried runs just fine on Linux. Wine/Proton has gotten really good these past 2 years. Even on Wayland, which has historically been bad for gaming things just work nowadays.

Have you considered something like a Steam Deck. It's a full a Linux instance, optimized for gaming but you can also hook up a keyboard+monitor and run traditional apps in desktop mode. I think most of the games mentioned are listed as playable on Deck (though large Skylines games might have issues with 16GB memory).

One of the great things about Linux is picking your distro. However, I'd suggest sticking with the latest version of Ubuntu desktop if you want to game.

Way more users means problems get solved there first (after Steam Deck, of course). File system support is good, and while I don't use NTFS partitions anymore, they worked fine for me. The user count also means larger communities of support.

If down the road you want to branch out, go for it! But play it safe for now. If you're used to Windows, install WinTile and Dash-to-Panel extensions in GNOME to make things familiar.

KDE is better than GNOME for Windows familiarity. GNOME feels like it's trying to emulate the experience of MacOS while KDE feels like it's trying to give a Windows-like experience.

That is a classical windows mentality. "gnome is cheap macos clone". Gnome tries just to create a minimal and distraction free and polished DE. KDE tries to bulldose as many features as possible and that sacrifices stability and UX. Analogy would be similar to having a leaky water pipe in the roof. Gnome would fix the leaking pipe meanwhile KDE would give you a bucket and a few towels to clean that up in different ways.