I am buying a friend’s PC for games. I want to avoid windows if at all possible, and I’m wondering what people’s experience using Proton in Linux for gaming has been. Are there certain publishers who use libraries Proton doesn’t handle well? Are there distros to avoid using with proton? Any other notes I should be aware of?
I spent a weekend configuring a gpu passthrough setup to run windows on my arch machine. I haven't needed it yet.
Generally any popular distro should be fine. SteamOS is arch (btw) but that doesn't mean its necessary.
That said, i don't play a ton of FPS, and when I do I have 0 interest in being competitive. Right now i don't really play any games with anti-cheat for online play. When i do play shooters i tend to play on xbox anyway, so if you also have a console you should be covered for any edge cases, esp when cross-play is available.
Once you pick the right proton version for a particular game things tend to just work. Protondb usually has enough info for solving any annoyances. ProtonTricks is helpful for annoyances.
For anything non-steam, Bottles is excellent. Bottles can also run games with Proton, but also supports wine (which as an upstream to proton gets many of the features of proton anyway). Bottles is also great for running windows programs.