Others have said enough but I just want to mention protondb.com look up a game you want to play here and you can see how others on Linux are doing with it.

Red Dead Redemption 2

Are you using the Steam version or the Rockstar version? Because the former should just work OOTB (unless something has changed recently). The latter can be a pain to get working.

I expected Civilization VI to run fine, and… it did. although anti-aliasing decided not to work.

It has a native version and sometimes they are missing features/performance. Try forcing Proton.

while Win 11 is basically “don’t worry, it’ll run!”

That hasn’t been my experience at all, even with gaming. But YMMV.

You didn’t mention it in your post, did you make sure you set proton to run for non-verified games in steam settings? Also did you try proton experimental and/or Proton-GE?

HUMANKIND seems to be a mixed bag but the others are reported to run well.

I agree that the experience on Linux is quite variable; I set up my Linux installation to play games once 3 years ago (it didn’t take me hours) and my Steam games are plug and play. I don’t play all the games from those lists but RDR2 plays perfectly fine for me. Occasionally, there would be updates that would introduce a regression for some games (DX12 is still a bit hit or miss on some titles) and it would take a few searches to find a workaround, but I can accept that, since I can stay on an OS I trust and would rather use. Rarely, there would be a serious bug or issue that I find difficult to triage because I can’t tell whose fault it is between Proton/Wine, Steam, Nvidia etc. But this happened once in the past few years.

I think what would help is Steam making their own Wiki (with contributors) on gaming on Linux for its own platform for players who just want a streamlined experience.

But communities like /c/linux_gaming (or its orange site equivalence) are ways to get support and help one another. You could even see it as the “friends you make along the way”.

I would say gaming on Linux has come a long way since, but depending on how much time and energy one has for the occasional tinkering, one might need to exercise more patience. Sounds like Windows gives you what you need, and that’s okay.

Are you using AMDVLK or RADV? I’ve heard that AMDVLK has been the source of a lot of problems for AMDGPU users on Linux.

I still prefer doing 5% extra work on a particular game than having to deal with 100% more BS from the os itself all of the time.

You will get there(although I haven’t heard great things about Fedora gaming). I made the switch November 2021 and I haven’t booted back into windows in about 9 months. I ended up picked EndeavourOS cause I wanted something Arch based to be as close to Steam Deck packages as possible(and I already prefer KDE Plasma, so picked that as well).

I still have my hiccups. I still can’t get SteamVR to work at all. I spent about 45 minutes yesterday troubleshooting why Outward stopped working, when all the protondb reviews say “it just works”. I did eventually get it working from a random suggestion from the arch forums to add PROTON_NO_FSYNC=1 %command% to the steam launch commands and that fixed it. If I had to guess I think it’s something to do with my 1070Ti not playing nicely with the latest nvidia drivers. Also Epic made some sort of stupid update to FallGuys and I can no longer get it working for more one initial run per install. So that’s frustrating.

But I also love how much I know my system now. I love being able to update everything from one or two commands. I love pipewire for doing music recording stuff.(I fought for years on windows to try and cobble together something similar). I love having bash macros to easily download embedded videos and do quick ffmpeg conversions. Really, it definitely comes down to how I feel much more connected to this system than I ever did to a windows install.

RDR2 worked just fine on my system, which is very similar to yours:

• CPU: AMD 5600
• GPU: RX 6650XT
• RAM: 16GB 3000MHz
• SSD: 512GB M.2 NVMe
• OS: openSUSE Tumbleweed - used KDE on X11, can try on GNOME w/ Wayland later today (I switched recently)

So my GPU is slightly slower, but the same gen, and my CPU is the same class, but without the integrated graphics and one gen newer.

I did nothing to get RDR2 to work, I just installed and launched it.

I haven’t tried the others though.

Edit: I just checked, and it works fine on GNOME Wayland, so that’s not it.

Linux gaming often requires tinkering if there is no native port of the game, and that is unlikely to change in the near future or ever. If you are not the tinkerer type you should keep a Windows partition for games. I’ve been playing exclusively on Linux for the last two years and almost always the bigger AA games require some adjustment and “Googling” But if it is the cost of my freedom and system that I enjoy to use everyday then I accept it.