Others have said enough but I just want to mention protondb.com look up a game you want to play here and you can see how others on Linux are doing with it.

Red Dead Redemption 2

Are you using the Steam version or the Rockstar version? Because the former should just work OOTB (unless something has changed recently). The latter can be a pain to get working.

I expected Civilization VI to run fine, and… it did. although anti-aliasing decided not to work.

It has a native version and sometimes they are missing features/performance. Try forcing Proton.

while Win 11 is basically “don’t worry, it’ll run!”

That hasn't been my experience at all, even with gaming. But YMMV.

You didn't mention it in your post, did you make sure you set proton to run for non-verified games in steam settings? Also did you try proton experimental and/or Proton-GE?

HUMANKIND seems to be a mixed bag but the others are reported to run well.

I agree that the experience on Linux is quite variable; I set up my Linux installation to play games once 3 years ago (it didn't take me hours) and my Steam games are plug and play. I don't play all the games from those lists but RDR2 plays perfectly fine for me. Occasionally, there would be updates that would introduce a regression for some games (DX12 is still a bit hit or miss on some titles) and it would take a few searches to find a workaround, but I can accept that, since I can stay on an OS I trust and would rather use. Rarely, there would be a serious bug or issue that I find difficult to triage because I can't tell whose fault it is between Proton/Wine, Steam, Nvidia etc. But this happened once in the past few years.

I think what would help is Steam making their own Wiki (with contributors) on gaming on Linux for its own platform for players who just want a streamlined experience.

But communities like /c/linux_gaming (or its orange site equivalence) are ways to get support and help one another. You could even see it as the "friends you make along the way".

I would say gaming on Linux has come a long way since, but depending on how much time and energy one has for the occasional tinkering, one might need to exercise more patience. Sounds like Windows gives you what you need, and that's okay.

Can you list the issues because I don't have problems with these titles on linux. Maybe fedora issues, they are notorious for not fixing issues. That's why nobara was born

Freedom requires sacrifices. I research if a game will run before buying it. I don't but the ones that won't, because freedom is more important to me.

This is why I’ll still use Win 11 as my daily.

I think your goal should be to do the opposite. Run GNU/Linux as your daily and switch to Windows only when you have to. Eventually you will become better at solving issues and will be able to run more games without using Windows. Maybe in a few years you will even decide that you no longer care about those remaining games that don't run and ditch Windows entirely.

That won’t convince a lot of people

That's fine. Most people don't care about freedom, security and privacy, so they aren't willing to spend the extra effort to get those things. But it also means that publishers don't have a good reason to stop abusing their users with DRM and spyware, since people will buy those games anyway. They don't have to publish for GNU/Linux, because people are fine with running Windows and not being in control of their computers.

RDR2 worked just fine on my system, which is very similar to yours:

• CPU: AMD 5600
• GPU: RX 6650XT
• RAM: 16GB 3000MHz
• SSD: 512GB M.2 NVMe
• OS: openSUSE Tumbleweed - used KDE on X11, can try on GNOME w/ Wayland later today (I switched recently)

So my GPU is slightly slower, but the same gen, and my CPU is the same class, but without the integrated graphics and one gen newer.

I did nothing to get RDR2 to work, I just installed and launched it.

I haven't tried the others though.

Edit: I just checked, and it works fine on GNOME Wayland, so that's not it.

I have a very similar system to you (Fedora 38 + AMD 5800X3D + AMD 6900 XT) as my daily driver and out of the games you listed I can only tell you that Red Dead Redemption 2 worked out of the box with no tinkering.

One thing that comes to mind, maybe it's using the integrated GPU of your 4600G?

I exclusively play Steam games on my Ubuntu machine because I don't have to do anything, it just works for me (only had to set up proton once on Steam and I was done forever).

There are sim games that I just boot into Windows to play them.

The boot up time of programs and privacy is worth it in my mind.

Works for me

Dropping by to throw some more praise onto the pile for Nobara Linux - it's my current distro and I have an AMD RX 6700 as well. All the games in my Steam library work great, including Baldur's Gate 3 (no tweaks necessary other than enabling the latest GE-Proton version). Unfortunately I haven't played any of the games you listed; my preferences lean mostly towards RPGs like Elden Ring, Path of Exile, Guild Wars 2, Valheim (with mods!), Enderal and so on.

Do you have Proton installed, and did you tell Steam to run games using it? Go to Steam -> Settings -> Compatibility. Make sure Enable Steam Play is checked for both Supported and "Other" titles, and the drop down has a Proton version in it. I personally use Proton Experimental for everything.

I can't help but notice that Civ VI, F1 2015 and Broforce which all work for you are all native Linux titles, and all of the ones that don't work don't have Linux versions and would therefore need to be run through Proton. ProtonDB lists all of them as Gold tier titles, so they should generally work okay with only minor issues. Steam doesn't do great messaging and prompt players to do this from what I remember.

Fedora 38 specifically is terrible for gaming. Google and you'll find out how bad. Ubuntu and derivatives still seem to be the best supported for most gaming applications, especially Steam.

Linux gaming often requires tinkering if there is no native port of the game, and that is unlikely to change in the near future or ever. If you are not the tinkerer type you should keep a Windows partition for games. I've been playing exclusively on Linux for the last two years and almost always the bigger AA games require some adjustment and "Googling" But if it is the cost of my freedom and system that I enjoy to use everyday then I accept it.

Are you using AMDVLK or RADV? I've heard that AMDVLK has been the source of a lot of problems for AMDGPU users on Linux.

Are you on Wayland or X11? And have you tried switching it?

I also totally get your point and agree. I started using Fedora this year as well and especially Wayland is driving me nuts but X11 isn't a great alternative either, at least on a notebook. For example: you lose a lot of useful touchpad features, if you go back to X11.

Also a side note, they pushed the new steam ui broken and games crash immediately if the overlay displays anything

You will get there(although I haven't heard great things about Fedora gaming). I made the switch November 2021 and I haven't booted back into windows in about 9 months. I ended up picked EndeavourOS cause I wanted something Arch based to be as close to Steam Deck packages as possible(and I already prefer KDE Plasma, so picked that as well).

I still have my hiccups. I still can't get SteamVR to work at all. I spent about 45 minutes yesterday troubleshooting why Outward stopped working, when all the protondb reviews say "it just works". I did eventually get it working from a random suggestion from the arch forums to add PROTON_NO_FSYNC=1 %command% to the steam launch commands and that fixed it. If I had to guess I think it's something to do with my 1070Ti not playing nicely with the latest nvidia drivers. Also Epic made some sort of stupid update to FallGuys and I can no longer get it working for more one initial run per install. So that's frustrating.

But I also love how much I know my system now. I love being able to update everything from one or two commands. I love pipewire for doing music recording stuff.(I fought for years on windows to try and cobble together something similar). I love having bash macros to easily download embedded videos and do quick ffmpeg conversions. Really, it definitely comes down to how I feel much more connected to this system than I ever did to a windows install.