>Audio production is also kind of a no-go

I always see this as a yes and no. Yes if you didn't start giving up on mainstream DRM encumbered audio production 10-15 years ago you aren't going to be ready to switch. Those people have sunk too much into their work flows and collections of licensed plugins.

No if like me you gave up on those tools and found new ones, because I didn't like the direction things were going with usb license keys, always online drm, and offline license management installs that feel almost as rootkit/malware coded as modern anticheat systems.

It helps that I gave up on ableton back in 2008 and swapped to Reason & Logic, before ultimately giving up on those as well. Now I just use Renoise & VCV Rack while trying to work up the will to dabble with Puredata and Supercollider.

Bitwig sounds nice but its too expensive and locks me back into the same cycles of update purchases Ableton & Reason once did.

Do I miss my Korg VSTs & Reason Racks? Yeah, I just can't be bothered enough to go back.

In the end for me its just a hobby so I've been willing to throw away my setup and workflow entirely more than once since starting with digital music in 2004.

I think the situation with anti-cheat on Linux is changing. Studios are putting resources into anti-cheat that will work on Linux. If I'm being a bit cynical, I could say this is "just" because of Steam Deck and Steam Machine, but I think the number of potential players switching to Linux right now outside of the Steam ecosystem is starting to be worth considering.

A balanced take. You name several exceptions that don't work seamlessly on Linux. Recognizing that, I'll note:

- Bitwig 5.x (haven't tried the latest 6.x) is working really nicely for me now across several NixOS machines (I'm using BitwigBox so that yabridge smoothes out VST integration). - Le Mans Ultimate is working for me now. It would hang on loading a track until a month or two ago (GE Proton recommended).

Wine has evolved a lot, but there's an entire community dedicated to improving games specifically building Proton, essentially a Wine fork focused on games, including big contributions from Valve.

This has made many old and modern games playable without issues. On Steam or Heroic Launcher, running a game has mostly become as simple clicking install and later play.

That being said, it's not all peachy. There's not really been much progress on native Linux gaming outside of Flatpak/Steam Linux runtime. Many native games run worse or with issues.

And Proton/Wine isn't perfect. Many games need tweaks or may not work without glitches. And games with anticheat don't work more often than they do, on purpose.

Still, depending on what games you play and hardware you own it has become entirely possible to ditch Windows and not suffer for it.

I don’t play multiplayer stuff like Fortnite or Call of Duty, so I might not be your typical user. I use Steam for everything, as well.

But I fully switched to Fedora a while ago because every game I played was either just as performant or ran better on Linux. It’s plug and play, too. I just downloaded Steam and that was it.

I know there are other commenters saying the same thing, but I’m just super excited because of what this means for Linux market share on consumer machines

PC gaming on linux these days is joy these days. The main games you're likely to struggle with are games that require some windows kernel level anti-cheat software running, so some online multi-player will not be playable for that reason. Proton, wine, and the ecosystem have evolved a lot in the last couple years to the point that I'm surprised when a game can not run on linux. Occasionally, you need to look at https://www.protondb.com/ to see if there is some startup option that needs to be added to get the game to run. If you're into single player games, Linux is generally a really solid choice.

In the last few years, Valve has made incredible progress with their equivalent set of API wrappers to what Wine does. Apparently (not experienced first hand) it’s like 97% of the way there, now.

if you have a steam account, and you open it on Linux most of your games will be present to be played. Most of them will just work. Those that don't you can look up details on protondb.com.

as mentioned above if you play any competitive games that come with anti-cheat features, then you won't be able to join in the fun. So if you don't care about those games, you'll be fine.

In short, it is the default assumption that a game will play on Linux these days, vs. assuming it won't.

Steam/Valve has built Proton, which I believe is a fork of Wine, and put significant resources into it. Steam distributes it on its own but CachyOS distributes even more patched/optimized versions of it in their repositories.

The games I know do NOT work on Linux are usually online multiplayer competitive games which have kernel-level anti-cheat. Notable for me is Fortnite - though I hear that now, there are even options for enabling strong anti-cheat in Linux but Epic chooses not to support it.

I'm not informed on other niche game types like simulators or games requiring special equipment, but chances are if it's not competitive, or it's single player, you can get it running with good performance on Linux with modern hardware.