Brave blocks Microsoft Recall by default

Right, but thanks to Proton that’s just not relevant? Blue Prince, Clair Obscure, Lost Records, The Alters, Doom: The Dark Ages, Oblivion Remastered, South of Midnight… all run just fine on Steam on linux.

If you have older hardware and play older games, Proton often doesn't run those as well as windows on the same hardware. On my laptop (win10/ubuntu dual boot, about 6 years old) windows is significantly faster in every game I have tried. I also had to do a futzy ad-hoc binary search to find a proton version that works with one game (either fallout 3 or fallout new vegas, can't remember which). And proton generally crashes more.

> If you have older hardware

So Windows 11 won't work, will it?

As a counterpoint; I've primarily played games that are old or jank as hell to setup in general. Septerra Core, Nox, Diablo 2, various assortments of RPG Maker games across different engines. They all worked perfectly fine and arguably were easier to setup on a modern machine than trying to figure out how to get them working on Windows.

The only game that didn't work out of the box for me was Path of Exile 2.

Every single game you mentioned has some sort of tinker step reported on protondb even though it may be marked platinum. Here’s the one for oblivion:

    DRI_PRIME=1 WINEDLLOVERRIDES="xaudio2_7=n,b" PULSE_LATENCY_MSEC=90 %command%

Or maybe it’s this one that the next user reported…

    DXIL_SPIRV_CONFIG=wmma_fp8_hack FSR4_UPGRADE=1 game-performance %command%

I personally don’t want to have to do stuff like that to get them to work.

These are almost always unnecessary. I have 460 games in my Steam library (most of them are popular games, including ones mentioned in the parent comment, not obscure indies) and all of them work great out of the box without command line options. That's a higher success rate than my Windows machine. For example, the latter command is for someone who wants to hack in FSR4 support on 9xxx AMD cards; this is for power users.

They run "just fine" meaning their developers and publishers just tolerate the fact that someone out there may be running them on unsupported OS's, and that too only barely. Many will straight up lock their games out of Linux, let alone support them.

There are very few games that run "better" on Linux, and that too only on specific benchmarks and after a lot of tweaks and hacks. Nvidia is a lost cause, many devices, parts and peripherals don't bother providing Linux driver support, and HDR & VRR have either bog-standard implementations or are straight-up unsupported. There is no way any current nontrivial game runs better out-of-the-box on any Linux distro for a layman than on Windows on most retail "gaming" computers.

I haven't played most of those games, but I can at least attest that I could run Clair Obscur with no tinkering whatsoever. A lot of times even if some people had to tinker with a game, you will be just fine and not have to tinker.

Having played Doom, Oblivion, Blue Prince, and Clair Obscur on linux, I can tell you that the tinker steps are unnecessary. I have literally just clicked play and didn't need to think about it. This didn't require a bunch of manual setup to get to that point either; I installed Endeavour and it installed the drivers I needed, then I installed Steam as normal and it was like nothing had changed from my Windows install.

People will post their tinker steps for everything. It's often just to disable the steam overlay, or inject their own overlay, or whatever they think gets them an extra 2 fps. It's linux and people love to configure it their way, but honestly steam/proton handles it automatically 99% of the time.

It won't, but since 10 still exists I'm just running that now and will probably do so as long as I can - then maybe I can get a hardware upgrade, do the proton switch, and my games will run about as well as they used to with 10 on my old hardware - with some fiddling naturally.

My point is it isn't a universal truth that everybody currently running 10 can just switch to linux/proton now and it is seamless. Really depends on what you run and your hardware, as with everything linux.

I also hack some games with dll injection and I don't know how I'm going to get that working with proton, maybe it works, maybe it doesn't.