[TheRealDunkirk]

Wine is the inverse effort of WSL. Both are trying to integrate the best of the other operating system. WSL -> Give Windows users a good modern web app development experience. Wine -> Give Linux users Office and games. To that end, both have their measure of success, and shortcomings. As someone who ran Linux on the desktop for 19 years, I tried every incarnation of Wine I could get my hands on. In the end, I just always kept a Windows partition for playing games.

[Zhyl]

Proton may be your saviour*

*unless the games you play are online games with Anti-Cheat.

[TheRealDunkirk]

Given the hype, I almost want to reinstall Linux to try it out, and see what all the fuss is about.

And it's funny you bring up anti-cheat, because my biggest success using Wine was Battlefield 2, which actually ran more smoothly on my machine under Linux than Windows, but then I tried to get online, and learned a harsh lesson.

[Zhyl]

As someone who has invested time and energy into setting up Wine, I think you will be pleasantly surprised by how painless it is to set up a Steam game with Proton. That is to say, you click 'install' as if you were installing a Native game and then when you click 'Play Game' it shows you a quick warning that Steam will be using a compatibility tool and then will boot up without any more fuss.

The caveat is largely that not all games are solved by this [0], and the official Valve whitelist needs to be turned off in settings to use it for all games, but even with these it's still a marked improvement in Quality of Life and barrier to entry for running Windows games on Linux.

I'd give it a go if you have time/inclination. I can recommend it as someone who is now Linux only as a result of this.

[0] - www.protondb.com

[ACS_Solver]

I've also run Linux for a long time, and have used Wine since before 1.0 to run some games, with very mixed results. Overall, the same experience for years - most games would have some issues, and many simply wouldn't run, so I kept Windows for gaming.

Proton was a dramatic change for me. A few clicks to enable Proton for a particular game, and then it just seamlessly runs and works. Granted, not all games do (check ProtonDB) but all the games I've wanted to play for the last couple of years have worked. I'd say Proton is the most significant thing to ever happen for Linux gaming support, and it did more for me overnight than many years of trying with Wine.

Modern multiplayer games with anti-cheat are mostly broken, some popular ones like Rainbow Six Siege are impossible to play. But if you mostly play other games, give Proton a try.