Wine is always a viable option, especially for older games. With DirectX 11 support coming later this year, almost every Windoze only game should hopefully work.
It is? I've personally seen better performance with Wine + Linux than with Windows.
Now, this isn't to say that Wine is totally up to par with Windows in terms of compatibility, but performance hasn't been a significant issue for quite some time.
Parent's post has so many qualifiers, it says nothing at all.
I do not see a performance penalty at all with WINE. Most games that work play at speeds matching or better than windows. WoW is usually a big example of that, as are emulators.
WoW and emulators are both fairly trivial for a modern system to run well. There is definitely a significant performance hit if you are running something in WINE that nearly maxes your performance in windows
I updated to Windows 10 and found it to be so painfully slow that I switched to Ubuntu 14.04 for gaming. I've honestly had a pretty good experience playing everything from low-fi indie titles (like Terraria) to AAA releases (like Shadow of Mordor). Try it out!
> I updated to Windows 10 and found it to be so painfully slow
I initially had that problem, but it seemed to be the fact that (on top of some phoning-home options that I missed disabling originally, which seemed to play some role in the slowness -- disabling them helped) the Windows 10 update from Windows 8.1 also, for some unknown reason, rolled WLAN drivers back to the versions that were several years old (pre-Win8.1 at least) and fairly broken and couldn't automatically locate new ones; redownloading the latest (for Win8.1 -- no Win 10 specific drivers were available for the hardware in question) drivers (which is what had been installed prior to the update) resolved the slowness problems.
Steam is owned by Valve and Valve is a US company. Using steam will not change anything since it is the US laws allowing/requiring companies to comply with the NSA.
The difference being that I want to use Windows only for games without all this other cloud integration crap that comes with it.
Steam OS is a Linux-based OS designed primarily for gaming. Any and all cloud-integration will be specifically gaming-focused.
Can you not see the difference between that and a general purpose OS like Windows harvesting data everything you do on your system?
I won't be using Steam OS to do anything very sensitive like sending or receiving personal e-mails, editing word documents or spreadsheets, or browsing the internet for whatever reason.
Unless you consider firing up a shooter or a city-building sim sensitive.
The two OS's have very different purposes and use-cases.
https://steamdb.info/linux/