Linux surpasses the Mac among Steam gamers

Steam gets all my gaming budget, as I really try to stick to Linux.

If it ain't on steam, I don't play it, and they don't get my money.

It’s sad to me that you and many others have this opinion, which is fine, but Valve takes a significant tax from small companies while gamers, a cheap demographic, complain about the price of games.

Games don’t need to be on Steam to be good.

I won't buy a non-native Linux game that's not on steam. The steam Linux stuff "just works", I don't need to mess around with wine/wintricks/proton or different wrappers like lutris.

If the developers have a native Linux version that I can buy directly from their site, I might do that as well to show my support (but still buy it on steam since it's just too convenient).

I am on Linux and i vastly prefer DRM-free stores as i keep my own offline backups of games (and other software) i buy. As a result i have almost 1000 games from GOG, Zoom Platform and other non-Steam places.

In my experience 99% of the games work out of the box with wine-staging, DXVK and VKD3D-Proton (which works with wine-staging just fine). No need to mess around with anything, just install wine-string, install DXVK and VKD3D-Proton and you are ready to run pretty much everything with "wine installername.exe" or "wine gamebinary.exe".

I never had to use winetricks, lutris or anything of the sort.

I also play games on Steam and even got a Steam Deck (on which i also play games i got outside from Steam), so it isn't like i am Valve-free, but you certainly do not have to tie yourself on Steam if you are gaming on Linux nor your experience will be any worse.