To be fair there still is a lot of tinkering involved to get gaming on Linux working properly (unless you’re on the stramdeck, but even them you’ll have to tinker for anything that’s not verified). Switching proton runners, changing launch options, fighting updates. It’s definitely more than most people are willing to deal with. For me personally, I’ve had to stop updating my video drivers because Nvidia 555 causes all Proton games to crash for me.

I enjoy the experience of tinkering and troubleshooting, so I’m okay with all that, but I completely understand why most people wouldn’t want to use Linux for gaming.

I honestly cant remember the last time I bought a game and it didnt just work with no tinkering on proton. Though I am on AMD not Nvidia which makes things a lot easier.

I guess this could also be based on the distro you use as well as your graphics card. For me, I use EndeavourOS, which is very close to base arch, so I had to do some extra setup to get proton working on it. For some reason, Proton refused to work on the Arch repo’s Steam package, so I had to use the flatpak version instead