Please, that's rookie terms.

Set it to 98, you won't have to worry about it again for like, a century.

I play exclusively on Linux. Almost every game I tried worked flawlessly. The very few that didn't, crashed on startup or a few minutes after. If you don't play AAA online games with anticheat then you should be good. As a rule of thumb, if it works on the Deck then it will work on any Linux distro.

If you are using steam, there's protondb, where you can check how well game runs on linux

I'm a fairly casual gamer these days, but nonetheless it's been a very long time since I encountered a game on Steam that wouldn't run at least tolerably well under Proton, with most of them running flawlessly. As long as you check the DB before buying, you're fine. As you say, it's only really the anticheat software which causes major road blocks most of the time.

Performance is amazingly better on Linux via Proton than it is on Windows quite a lot of the time. It's an incredible achievement.

For non Steam games, Lutris also provides as easy, one-click experience for getting many games working, and although I don't have a lot of personal experience with it (Steam covers most of my needs) when I have used it it's been a pleasure, and it has a good reputation.

I use bog standard un-tweaked Ubuntu. One would assume that the performance on the specialist gaming distros may be even better still.

I'm always blown away by how well gaming on Linux is in this era.

Especially if you're not gonna play stuff that the anticheat locks you out from, the experience is great. As other commenters have said, ProtonDB.com has resources for how well games on steam run under Proton / On Linux.

Although, I would recommend Nobara Linux over Chimera OS due to a lack of experience with Proton and other gaming-related tools (as in, Chimera developers' lack of experience). Nobara Linux comes from the same developer as Proton-GE (GloriousEggroll). Proton is the tool that Valve developed to run Windows games pretty much seemlessly, and Proton-GE adds extra features and patches on-top of it that can help support more games or get the slightest extra bit of performance out of Proton. Nobara Linux extends this concept to the entire OS, with a stable Fedora base that gets a major update every ~6 months.

Nobara also consitently outperforms other Linux Distributions and even Windows regularly.

(This doesn't mean that you don't get updates for 6 months, just that major releases, e.g from 39 to 40 happen every ~6 months)

To be fair, W8.1 wasn't that bad, you could even change the full screen start menu to a regular one. W10 was better though. W11 is... well they fixed the most glaring issues over the last year but I still can't get over the crippled start menu.

Vista wasn't actually a bad OS, it just got a bad reputation pretty fast because it had higher hardware requirements than XP and most people didn't have decent enough hardware for a smooth experience. That in combination with the new UAC feature that most people thought was annoying drove people away pretty fast, although the OS itself wasn't bad - in fact, it's pretty similar to Windows 7.

LOL wasn't ME sorry of a bolt on to 98? IIRC that was the most unstable version of Windows I had ever used. It actually forced me to explore Linux as a desktop seriously for the first time (and shit was jacked in 98-00). I seriously used NT4 as a desktop because it was the most stable version of Windows I could find at the time. Hard time playing games though.

They're eventually going to release SteamOS onto desktop platforms, but for now you can just install Linux.

SteamOS has so many deck and handheld specific features that it's not really a good OS for desktop hardware. HoloISO is something you can install, though, as long as you don't have a Nvidia card, which is just SteamOS packaged in a way that let's it run on other hardware