It's vastly better than it was 5 years ago. You can get an idea by going to protondb.com and looking at games. Basically, most games work out of the box with minimal to no issues. Even most new games work on release without major issues.

The biggest issue is anti-cheat and DRM. That can be a show stopped for some users, but for me it hasn't been an issue.

I switched full time to Linux about 3 months ago, I had been wanting to for a long time since I prefer dev work on Linux and generally hate Windows.

Gaming is nearly as easy on Linux as on windows, especially through steam imo. Almost all games will work right out of the box, just set steam to use proton for any non linux-natve games and it does it. The only game I've had an issue with is cyberpunk 2077, and that was fixed with a few minutes of googling, then pasting a launch config into the settings, now it runs perfectly. One thing to watch out for, no games that use a kernal-level anticheat will work on Linux unless they specifically support it, sucky but those anticheat software makers are coming around to support it slowly.

I actually prefer installing software on Linux to doing it on Windows. Same process for finding software, just Google it and look for stuff that works on Linux. Even proprietary stuff runs natively on Linux sometimes, I personally look for free and open source software as an alternative every time and it usually is better imo. Once you find what you want, it's super easy to install. No need to deal with downloading files, clicking them to install, and all that jazz. Just open a terminal and do "yay -S {package name}" and it'll install. Also makes it very easy to install multiple things at once, especially if you already know what software you want. Cherry on top, updates aren't forced on you. You can update all of your packages with "yay -Syu", or update individual ones if you want, there's a lot of control over it, and you don't need to rely on the app to have its own update tool.

Sometimes there's windows specific software that isn't on Linux, it kind of sucks, but almost everytime I'm able to find free and open source software that's natively Linux compatible and is better than the closed source software I initially wanted. Even with windows-specific software, most things can be run with wine and work just like a native Linux app. Sometimes things don't work on wine, but basically all of them will have free and open source alternatives you can use instead, or there are workarounds that are probably easy to find.

If you wanted to do the 2 PC's you definitely can, I would recommend one PC and just add a Linux partition or hard drive, you then boot into Windows or Linux but don't need a whole new PC. You have to reboot to go between them, but you can access each systems files from the other one (can't run games, but like documents and such). If you do go with 2 PC's though, I recommend using an app called Barrier for the mouse/keyboard sharing. I use it between my PC (Linux) and my work laptop (windows) and it's great, my work laptop stays folded up and I have only one mouse and keyboard on my desk.

That's what a lot of Linux people miss. They've been dealing with it for a while already so a lot of them are like "it's so easy!" and then they have to start explaing repos and containers to people and the person just sticks to Windows.

I have two hard drives. One dedicated to each Windows and Linux. It maies life easier.

If you play a lot of competitive multiplayer games, it would be better to keep a windows partition for them (overwatch is the only game that I had a good experience on Linux).

I used to play some competitive Apex, I was overjoyed when I heard anti cheat support is available on Linux, and quickly installed it. I tried it a couple of times since then, the most recent being last month - The game is playable but not on a competitive level imho. The smoothness is just not there. Then again this might be because of my low spec hardware.

Games like Valorant just won't work because of their kernel level anticheat. (But hey we have Conter-Strike 2 now)

AAA games run just fine for the most part, its playable and I usually get performance similar to windows.

The steam deck uses a custom Linux distro made by valve specifically for it. So it's at least good enough for gaming that valve trusted it for their mainstream handled gaming PC.

I've got one and tbh it's pretty good. As long as you stick to games that are rated as either verified or playable on steamdeck you'll probably have a good time.

Proton is incredibly simple to use, and gaming on Linux is pretty seamless for like 3/4+ of games now. Including Factorio.

Honestly that is a pretty awful experience. Proton is infinitely better for games than wine in my opinion though, I definitely recommend giving it another try. I have a good 20 games on steam from AAA to indie, the only one to have any issues was cyberpunk 2077 and even that was a simple launch command fix that I found in a couple minutes of googling the problem and it runs fine now.

I admittedly haven't dealt with wine too much since most games can be run with proton and I avoid programs that don't support Linux, but I was able to run heavily modded Minecraft at basically the same fps as on windows with no wine tweaking. Lutris is also a good platform that can make installing non-steam games much easier

If you want a good os to try instead of jumping ship at random, I'd recommend grabbing endeavour os and picking whatever desktop environment you like on top of it, all of their stuff looks good right out of the box and gets you a lot of the necessities. Any of their official desktop environments (except i3) are super easy to use and should be familiar to windows users, I'm a strong believer in arch superiority because if there's a problem, someone else has already fixed it and you can steal their solution even though there is a learning curve to customizing it

Minecraft and other java apps actually run better on Linux because of the way the scheduler works, something wasn't right with your system.

Yep! Quick search turns this up, looks like you don't even need wine for it which is even better.

https://docs.unrealengine.com/4.27/en-US/SharingAndReleasing/Linux/BeginnerLinuxDeveloper/SettingUpAnUnrealWorkflow/#:~:text=Whether%20you%20downloaded%20the%20Unreal,located%20on%20your%20hard%20disk.

(Unreal engine also has a specific Linux page, but I don't have an epic games account so I can't view it - https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/linux )

Wine basically let's you run windows-only software on Linux by making a directory that emulates windows, installs needed dependencies, etc. Most windows programs can be run smoothly using wine in my experience, the main ones that can't are games with kernal-level anticheat. If you've heard of Proton, that's valves fork of wine that they've built up specifically for games