No hate, I'm just surprised. I've legitimately never not had a game work so far, and most people I know only seem to have issues on games with anti-cheat.

Doesn't mean I don't believe you though, I just might have horseshoes in my ass, such that I somehow have only played games that are largely compatible without issues.

I am curious what games had issues for you though.

The uncomfortable truth is that a lot of people will straight up lie just to "improve the image" of Linux. I've been using Linux for about 8 years now and I wouldn't say that "it's perfect now" or "everything just works". No. Absolutely not. I play a lot of co-op games with friends and there are issues all the time. EA launcher taking YEARS to start, so my friend starts the game and waits, waits, waits... for me. Sometimes in-game audio decides to just stop working and I have to restart the game. And don't even get me started on the fear "if I alt-tab right now, will the game work? will it crash? will i get a black screen when I go back?". There are issues, nitpicks, bugs. The experience is the absolute opposite of "just works". And this comes from someone who absolutely loves open source software and Linux. There was a time where I did a lot of that "Linux shilling" too. I recommended Linux to everyone, asked my friends if they wanted to switch, told them that it's absolutely fine nowaydays. But I stopped, because I realized that it's a lie. I know they'd be going through the same issues that I have, and more. And if you're not an actual Linux enthusiast that cares about the stuff that Linux stands for, you won't be happy with it.

Instead of having 2**32 distros and compatibility shims

But that's the thing, pretty much all distros are the same when it comes to games. Steam manages dependencies and Proton versions for you, so your base OS really doesn't matter too much as long as some games launch (outside of weird exceptions like using some random tiling WM).

Unfortunately the chatter here really backfired for me.

Yeah, people love to over-promise for some reason. People really should be pointing to options for users to check things before switching, such as:

• Steam Deck compatibility - verified or playable
• ProtonDB - gold or platinum

In general, if it has anti-cheat, it probably won't work. If it doesn't, then you can try adjusting:

• Proton version (and Proton GE)
• command-line parameters - e.g. force older DirectX or something

None of that is related to your distro though, so if people on ProtonDB say it should work with given Proton version and CLI parameters, it should work on whatever distro you choose.

I rarely play anti-cheat games, so most of my games work w/o any tweaks. If you mostly play anti-cheat games, most of your games probably won't work.

Not gonna lie, you probably will get lots of hate, but fanboys will be fanboys, just ignore them.

In any case, this probably means you enjoy multiplayer AAA games, since as a general rule those are essentially the only ones that don't work out of the box nowadays. Unfortunately those games are actively trying to detect if you're using Linux to prevent you from playing, and if you had managed to play them you could have gotten yourself banned (like some users reported with some games).

The other large cause for problems is the wrong drivers or not using the correct GPU in multi-GPU systems. If you were having issues with games everyone else was playing in Linux this is likely the cause.

You choose Mint, which is an excellent beginner friendly distro, and it's very close to Ubuntu which is the de-facto common ecosystem agreed to use. That discussion about having a common ecosystem was over a long time ago, it's Ubuntu. But that doesn't mean you're stuck with that, it means that developers can focus on targeting one OS, and the community will figure out how to get it working in other variations when it doesn't work out of the box. If it requires changes from the game we usually submit a bug report explaining what needs to be changed and why. But for you, the end-user, just having Ubuntu or something similar like Mint should get you a good experience since games are tested using that.

At the end of the day Linux is not for everyone, sometimes you want specific software that is not made for Linux and that's okay (okay on your part, fuck the companies that are actively making software unusable on Linux).

Which games didn't work?

Guess it depends on the games. I have no games in my collection that won't run on Linux, either natively or via Proton. The only games I'm aware of where there are massive issues are ones incorporating certain forms of anti-cheat software.