I have been a user of Linux for the past 14 years. In that time, I've observed a notable improvement in the ease of running games on the system, particularly games that were originally made for Windows.
This page will display a sample of Linux game compatibility data.
The WINE Is Not an Emulator (WINE) project is the foundation for any method of running Windows applications on Linux, originally created in 1993 to support Windows 3.1 applications.
Essentially, it translates Windows system calls into Linux calls, without the performance penalties of full emulation.
Proton is a tool built on top of WINE by Valve and CodeWeavers, initially released in 2018 and integrated into Steam.
The primary difference between Proton and base WINE is that Proton incorporates multiple libraries designed to improve rendering performance.
It is Proton that makes it possible to run Windows games with relative ease on Valve's Steam Deck console.
The chart on the left provides a general overview of the data.
Of the 3,533 compatibility reports gathered, only 856 reported games tested as being entirely nonfunctional.
Of the 2,677 reports of working gameplay, 1,510 had no issues whatsoever, with the game running perfectly out of the box.
Both Valve and the community at large make changes to Proton as needed to support new games.
This data visualization illustrates both the speed at which a newly released game can now become Linux-compatible, and the occasional periods of instability some games go through following major updates, using the Definitive Edition release of Age of Empires II as an example.
In general, however, single-player games tend to be more stable, as can be seen below with Outer Wilds and Cuphead.
The percentage of reports in green indicate that the game was playable, while the reports in orange indicate that the game was entirely unplayable.
Some games utilize anti-cheat modules that are designed to interface directly with the Windows kernel.
As a result, these games would normally be entirely incompatible with Linux.
However, Valve has been working with the developers of two common kernel-level anticheat modules (EasyAntiCheat and BattlEye) to allow games using these to run under Proton.
Now, as long as the developer permits it, these games will run perfectly well on Linux through Proton.
An example of this can be seen here, with Apex Legends.
Even from this small sample of data, I would conclude that the state of gaming on Linux has periods of instability, but is overall continuing to improve.
With even large-scale multiplayer games such as Apex Legends taking action to be more Linux-friendly, I believe the future of Linux as a gaming platform is brighter than ever.
All the data I used was originally collected by ProtonDB, a crowdsourced database of user reports of game compatibility with Linux.
The data I used is the complete set of ProtonDB user reports from October 2019 to October 2022, for a selection of ten different games:
Data from ProtonDB is made available under the Open Database License: Link. Any rights in individual contents of the database are licensed under the Database Contents License: Link.