What games keep you on Windows? Besides a few anticheat-enabled ones which choose not to support it, basically everything works fine. I game (and work in gamedev!) 100% on Linux.
My vr driving Sim rig just works in windows, the most I've ever had to do is map my shifter in game. Steamvr, hardware drivers, the actual games, it all just works without doing anything. Plug and play. I'm sure I can get it all working in Linux, eventually. I was(trying to) gaming on Ubuntu 10.04 with wine. I was first batch steamdeck and the amount of progress with gaming I've seen thanks to valve and proton means I'll be coming back. But I'm just waiting for steamOS to be open release. But I am a KDE head so honestly I'll end up whatever distro that does proton and KDE by the end of this year.
Over like half of the games I play with friends just do not work Linux because of anti-cheat. I hate it. I also can't use it for work or studies since I need access to a good CAD that just works. These 2 things and a proper Adrenaline software from AMD is all I need to fully switch to Linux. I do have a dual-boot Windows/Linux PC at home, but honestly, I can barely use Linux most of the time.
Ouch, that sucks yeah. Guess I got lucky with the games my friends like to play. Only one is I guess Valorant, but I don't engage with that one anyways. Guess you're stuck on the dual boot until devs of these games start ticking the Proton support box :P
Are Linux ports of games so hard to do? Genuine question. I am not a games dev.
My personal opinion is that Windows is an easier target because all Windows machines are consistent in their underlying interface with the user's hardware. Same idea with MacOS. You know what display manager and graphics library to target, and what packaging format to target.
Then, there's Linux, which can be one of any number of distributions with varying software stacks, packaging formats, etc. It's not that Linux gaming is radically difficult to support, it's just much less standardized. This makes it a lot more work for a much smaller demographic. The Vulkan graphics API has made some of the software issues much less of a problem, but you still have to contend with things like different display managers and stuff like packaging differences between distributions.
I think the problem with packaging isn't so much that there aren't good options. Some people don't like Flatpak. Some people don't like snaps. Maybe AppImage would be a good option. But these are all choices that can potentially fragment the target demographic even further, which reduces the value returned for the time invested in supporting it. Just my opinion, certainly not an expert.
Wine is a great solution for windows-only things. The great thing about gaming, though, is that many of them are using languages like C++ which have full support on Linux systems natively. If you then have your graphics running through Vulkan, that also works across platforms. So, in my opinion, Wine shouldn't be something we continue to need for gaming. Not saying Wine won't be used or won't continue to be useful for gaming, just that it doesn't have to be the primary path to support Linux.