I primarily use my pc for gaming, and want to avoid upgrading to Windows 11. Beginning the journey of looking into alternatives.
I am ignorant, trying to be less so. I have a hard time understanding what exactly makes a game not work just because of OS.
By and large, unless you are playing one of a few multiplayer games which require kernel-level anti-cheat schemes, you won’t have issues running Windows games on Linux. Note that kernel-level anti-cheat is also a huge issue in general, for privacy and other reasons, so it’s not really something that should or will be fixed in Linux – it’s up to developers to stop requiring such schemes.
I’ve been a Linux gamer for about 3 years. 3 years ago, I had occasional issues. Now not for a long time. But I play almost entirely single player titles.
Hardware does matter a bit. AMD is extremely Linux friendly and drivers for AMD hardware tends to be in the Linux kernel, so there’s nothing else to load. Nvidia makes things more difficult.