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.
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If it ain't on steam, I don't play it, and they don't get my money.
Games don’t need to be on Steam to be good.
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).
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.
That sounds like a fair bit of domain-specific knowledge driven steps that could quickly got awry and lead a novice deep into frustration.
Compared to... Clicking the Play button in the Steam launcher, ideally from your Steam Deck.
It's miles apart.
It isn't something i'd recommend to some random gamer (though judging from what i've seen people do with their Steam Decks i wouldn't underestimate gamers' technical abilities).
[0] like, say, me :-P. In 2020 i used Windows as my main OS after trying to switch to Linux as my main OS in 2018 but having some issues with games, but then i ended up having some visual glitches in a game that were fixed by throwing in DXVK. At that point i thought that this might actually be a sign that gaming on Linux now works fine - and indeed it did and since then i've being using it as my practically only OS because i can both work and game on it without feeling like i'm missing anything.
If it is buggy, they play something else. There is a wide enough offer for this strategy to work really well.
Being driven to install tools to get it to run is an exceptional behaviour and a lot of hassle for anyone, windows or Linux. Nearly noone does that.
I don't know what most people do as i am not most people, but i already addressed my expectations and assumptions on the first paragraph of the comment you replied to.