Even as recently as 2021, I still kept around a Windows partition for the occasional game that wouldn't run on Proton. I was still able to play the majority of what I wanted, but brand new titles often required patches after release, or some games would crash on occasion.
Now? I haven't even thought about compatibility in months. I don't even look at the user tweaks anymore, when it used to be a constant factor. Granted, I don't play multiplayer games with anticheat, which last I heard was still a lingering issue. Your mileage may vary, but I completely removed my Windows partition a while ago, and haven't even thought about since.
The Steam Deck is Linux and runs a large majority of games. You can do it on your laptop with Proton. It's amazing. Even weird stuff like Mass Effect Remastered (which requires EA Play client) works on Linux now.
Unfortunately 'the majority of games' wont include whatever fotm rando game my friends are inviting me to this time. If gaming was strictly a solo activity for me I would have gotten rid of windows a long time ago.
Almost all the games I play are these random multiplayer games with friends. In my experience, proton is only a blocker around 5% of the time. I still have a windows partition for those times (and I always laugh when I boot it and am "welcomed" by their "Let's take a moment to configure windows" garbage).
Just saying, if you have the HDD space, I'd say give dual booting a shot. you'll probably be surprised how usable Linux is for gaming these days.
I've moved 95% of my gaming to Linux entirely, after the steam deck convinced me it had gotten this good, and I barely miss Windows. Occasionally I'll still boot over to Windows for something like iRacing or to just experience some of the better graphics features, but honestly I find I don't really miss them and the Linux gaming experience these days is pretty seamless, even with my wacky setup of i3 and nvidia.
You'd be surprised how many games run perfectly well on Linux. Unless you're playing something with ridiculous anticheat like Valorant it will most likely run fine.
That was my position 5 years ago. For the last 3ish years I've been gaming on Linux with very few issues.
I'll be the first to say it's not perfect, but it's 100x better than it was 5 years ago. I'd say at least 70% of steam games just work when you hit play, 25% require a bit of configuring to get working, and only around 5% refuse to work at all.
I actually bought my first Windows machine since 2005 a couple of weeks ago. It’s been surprisingly better than I expected although it took a bit to work through some WSL quirks with SSH.
I haven’t gotten a machine with a proper graphics card in years and I wanted one to experiment with LLMs locally, so I got a gaming PC setup.
I regularly game with Steam and Lutris on Fedora and it's really good - I wouldn't say perfect but the only problems I've had have been with one or two much older titles. No way I'm going back to Windows.
Dosbox + Steam with Proton is the best PC gaming I've ever encountered.
There's a tiny gap in the early windows 9x days that I've been thinking of filling by upgrading my Dosbox Win 3.11 to Win 98. Overall though, it runs a greater percentage of dos/windows games than any dos/windows machine I've ever had access to.
(I'm considering moving to FreeBSD though. Dosbox runs fine, and Steam + Proton sort of works there, apparently. Checking it out in more depth soon.)
