I will begrudgingly use windows 11 at some point because of the games you can play on it. But for anything else I'm so glad Linux and its ecosystem exists, and is only getting more stable lately.
If you're playing games through Steam and haven't checked out Proton in a while, give it another try! The only game I haven't been able to get work on Ubuntu 16/18/20 is Fallout 3.
I completed Fallout 3 a few months ago on Ubuntu 20 under Proton (and Fallout: New Vegas). Try using Lutris's implementation of wine ± proton -- my GOG copy "just worked", much to my surprise. Including the mods, and mod managers!
If you continue to have trouble, drop me an email and I'll give you my configuration.
I very much second your sentiment about proton being "good enough". It's amazing! I have a less than stellar GPU -- a Radeon 570 -- and haven't found a single game that I can't play on 'ultra' settings at 1080p, including the in-development BG3.
After Apple's CSAM awfulness, my next laptop will be linux, ideally with a Zen processor, quite possibly running Manjaro and either KDE or i3.
There's only one ThinkPad with Ryzen that comes preloaded with Linux last I checked, but I'm hoping more come out soon since I really like ThinkPads. Either way, ThinkPads are worth a look since they play well with Linux, whether they come with Linux preloaded or not.
I'm also in the market (to replace my MacBook-esque XPS 13 Developer Edition), so if someone wants to suggest me a (other than ThinkPads) 13-14 inch laptop that will play well with Linux [not necessarily preloaded], let me know.
Don't like their rebadged Clevo hardware (I know they put a lot more effort than that, and I appreciate it, but the look is not for me). Other than that, IIRC they just came out with a Ryzen laptop and it's too big for my taste.
Don't feel bad - Fallout 3 (atleast from Steam) no longer works on Windows 10 either! Installed it the other day, googled after it failed to launch, and saw there's a few community efforts and hacks you can try to get it up and running. I gave up.
I would like to but the performance is a dealbreaker. If I'm on windows, I can expect to run latest titles at 60 fps on my 4 year old rig. That isn't possible on wine/proton.
Provided some garbage from either Microsoft or your hardware vendor isn’t sucking up all the I/O or CPU which has consistently been my experience the last few times I’ve suffered Windows.
Something like half of the top 10 games on Steam can't even start due to anti cheat and Steam is what's pushing gaming on Linux. To be fair to them if they weren't that number would be a lot worse, many of their own games are in that list. Of the ones that can they generally work alright but a few have intermittent crashes or things you have to workaround.
If you play older/smaller single player games though it generally does the job pretty darn well.