[Saoshyant]

Yes. Valve (Steam) spent more than a decade building and refining a translation layer called Proton. Nearly 80% of the vast Steam library is now compatible with Linux to the point they are releasing actual Linux consoles (Steam Deck and Steam Machine).

For your regular PC, you can install a gaming-focused distribution like Bazzite to get everything sorted out automatically.

[IshKebab]

80% is really impressive, but another way to state it is that 20% of the games you try won't work. I don't think I'd put up with that if I was a gamer. I guess maybe it's not evenly distributed. Do a higher percentage of the most popular games work?

[ndepoel]

That 20% is mostly covered by competitive online multiplayer games that use kernel-level anti-cheat systems which will only work on Windows. There's not a whole lot Valve can do about that, other than continuing to push Linux for gaming and hope that it gets popular enough to create an incentive for anti-cheat providers to start targeting Linux as well.

[IshKebab]

I never understood why game devs don't just segregate players based on their anti-cheat status. Have a setting in the game like "only play with anti-cheat verified players" that defaults to yes.

That way Linux gamers can still play with other Linux gamers if they want (and cheaters).

Not an ideal situation but probably better than nothing.

[quesera]

I think that would make Linux players into second-class citizens who could only play in a pool that is 90+% filled with Windows cheaters.

Segregating into two pools: Windows-verified, or Linux-unverified, would probably not work for Linux users either. It'd be the same problem (on a smaller scale) as not including kernel anticheat in Windows. No fun for the non-cheaters.

I'm not a gamer though, so I may be missing important details.

[colinb]

I think it's largely to do with the whether the games are PvP multiplayer or not. I.e. many such games have anti-cheat systems that embed in the Windows kernel (or something like that - my Windows internals knowledge is... slim).

I assert that most people who're happy running Linux on their desktop (for games or productivity or development) do not overlap much with the people who're happy to take kernel patches from UbiFuckingSoft. And this includes those people who're willing to take closed-source NVIDIA drivers.

[Telaneo]

Games with kernel-mode anti-cheat consistently don't work and probably never will (barring them having it removed or made optional). Titles released more recently are more likely to not work simply due to not having had fixes applied to them, although a rather large amount of newer games work fine out of the box if they aren't doing weird stuff. Other than that it's a toss-up, since while it's usually the same few things that prevent games from working properly on Linux, it's not something you as Jonothan S. Gamer will know about unless you go and do research and check ProtonDB and whatnot.

A good rule of thumb is that single player games generally just™ work and that older games generally just™ work.

[anthk]

Building, no. Refining Wine, yes.