Steam has now officially stopped supporting Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1.::95.57 percent of surveyed Steam users are already on Windows 10 and 11, with nearly 2 percent of the remainder on Linux and 1.5 percent on Mac — so we may be talking about fewer than 1 percent of users on these older Windows builds. Older versions of MacOS will also lose support on February 15th, just a month and a half from now. Correction: It’s macOS 10.13 and 10.14 that are losing support. Not macOS period.
If you are using steam, there’s protondb, where you can check how well game runs on linux
I appreciate the link, but I was more asking about the general experience than about game compatibility. I have a Steam Deck and am enjoying the game functionality, and I haven’t hit too many snags in general PC usage on it yet in desktop mode (but I’ve barely used it for that). I’m really just asking around as a medium level Windows user about fully replacing my Windows laptop with a Chimera build to see what concessions I’ll need to accept to have realistic expectations. I’m optimistic that frustrations will be mostly at the “dang it, oh well” level which I could either live with or find a layman level solution to kinda fix. So far, the only real concern I’ve found with my plan to build a modern Chimera steam machine is that the parts I want will cost me like $1500, and that’s pretty hard to justify when I already have a Steam Deck, PS5, and a 2015 Windows 10 laptop. It’s another expensive device that kinda just does what my current shit can already do, just all in one rig. If my laptop or PS5 died, I’d have a lot more reason to go for it.
Maybe the opinion of someone who switched recently would be more useful to you. I’m probably a little biased since I’ve been exclusively running linux for almost 20 years now
It’s very easy to create a bootable USB stick to just try it out and, if you have enough hard disk to spare and your experience is fine, make it dual boot. This way you can assess if it works for you or not
If you already have a Steam Deck, then you are basically already familiar with Linux gaming. The software-side of things (Steam, Proton, etc) is going to be the same on desktop Linux.
If a game is compatible with the Deck, then it is also comaptible with desktop.
I’ve been a Linux gamer for about a decade now. I stick with single player games, so I generally don’t have any issues, other than a minor tweak or DLL override I sometimes have to do, but that’s no different than trying to run older games on Windows.
Only real issue would be installing mods, which is possible, but could require some extra work, such as manually setting DLL overrides. I’ve had trouble getting Reloaded II to work in Linux, for example, even though they claim they support Linux.