I was in the same boat. But Valve seriously made it easy to install and play games on Steam. If you have a spare drive, give it a shot.

Things I had to do were to turn on proton in the steam settings and installing vulkan drivers for my AMD card.

I don’t want to possibly have to work to make a game work each and every time.

as long as it's not a competitive multiplayer, it's more likely than not that it'll work out of the box.

Check ProtonDB. The overwhelming majority of games work just fine on Linux with Steam's Proton. I encounter a game that genuinely will not work on Linux only like once or twice a year.

You're attacking this from the wrong angle. Tinkering every few weeks with something new on linux can keep your ADHD occupied ;-)

As an intermedia Linux user prior to making the jump 2 years ago, if you mainly game on Steam you're fine. Wine and Proton are mature developed now that most games 'just work'. Almost all the problems I've run into for gaming on Linux have come from trying to do something outside steam (although Blizzard and Activision games seem to be pretty low effort).

Once you get outside that, it's hit or miss (sometimes good hits. Sometimes bad misses).

What you'll have to say goodbye to is alphas, betas, and release weekends. They CAN function (I did all 3 Diablo 4 beta weekends last year with no issues at all), and there's plenty of early access stuff on steam that works fine even though the developers didn't care about Linux one bit. But usually if you're reporting issues on opening weekend for a new game, they're more concerned with making their game launch work for the 95%+ of users instead of the 5%. If you want stuff to 'just work' and don't want to spend your weekend tinkering with waiting for hot fixes or patches, you'll probably not want to make the switch. Or will want to change your mentality about which games you play and when.

That being said, the experience is constantly getting better. So in a year or two it may be a different story.

I run Pop!_Os. Steam with Proton is a gamechanger. Yet to find a game that doesn't just work with zero configuration.

Only thing I've found to really not work is head tracking. That's pretty niche though and I'm expecting someone to figure that out eventually. Almost every game ran no problem.

There has been a LOT of progress since the SteamDeck launched. The only real barrier now is multiplayer games that run anticheat. And even some of those have been figured out.

Try dual booting so you can test if it just works or if the friction involved is acceptable.

Actually with ADHD it's nice. Making something work under Wine (following the instructions from winehq.org) is a bit similar to a game itself

EDIT: Oh, there's another such comment.

If you have a spare drive, install Pop_OS! on it. Don't let people let you think that everything is a piece of cake. It can be a little frustrating. A lot of guides jump to "the rest of the fucking owl" or are made on older versions of software. Steam does make it easy but most games are not a matter of simply hitting install because they do not have a native Linux version. You have to right-click on the game, go to Manage, and then set compatibility to Proton (generally although some games need other settings added which you can often find in protondb.com). Is it worth? I like it. There are some basic things that can be annoying like my fingerprint reader not working even though fprintd supports it but I'm too lazy to make a bug report.

I just dual boot Ubuntu and Windows 11 on my laptop. W11 for gaming, Ubuntu for everything else.

but I have a tendency to jump into a new game for like 3 weeks and then off to the next like the horrid ADHD having fuck that I am

That's basically why I stopped gaming. Have saved so much money from not filling up my Steam library with games I'll never finish. lol

Try dual boot. Ideally install both OSs on separate drives and do windows first. Best of luck!

I think you should try it yourself, see if you like it. Who knows, perhaps it's not actually as troublesome as you think. You can always reinstall windows again anytime you want.

Take the plunge, you won't die.

I also have ADHD and concerns that my 40p game library would be an issue

I'll report back on this comment when I find a game that doesn't just work with Proton, cuz I haven't tried one yet that didn't (admittedly I haven't tried a kernel level anti cheat game)

Even FFXIV, an MMO, works and installed reshade with no issue

Literally the only issue I had installing Linux Mint was my sound card refusing to output sound even though the OS could see it. Every other jack worked, just not my sound card. Fixed it by plugging my phones into a different DAC lol, and the other jacks were fine anyway so it was NBD to begin with

No worries. Grab one of these going to a landfill and try it out - its all free!

People still have sound issues with gaming on Linux.

It's tremendously better, but it's not guaranteed.

Even in this very thread people are to make certain gaming features work in Linux.

That speaks volumes.