...it their money aren't already gone for a 999$ monitor stand.

SteamDeck buyers on the other side...

A mac port gets you mac users.

A linux port barely gets you more linux users because proton exists.

Apple's new porting helper is nothing but Wine + D3D to Metal wrapper + Rosetta x86 emulation.

Sadly corporate institutions still require windows

I was dual booting because of some games but decided to delete the Windows partition anyway. There are some games that I cannot play (mostly because of anti-cheat) but I don't care anymore. I'm more than 2 years free of Micro$oft and couldn't be happier.

Not OP, but personally i got bored of windows and wanted more control over my OS, especially as internet surveillance and data harvesting continue to be on the rise.

In my opinion a lot of the pushback comes from the fact that most distributions(especially recommended starters like Mint) don't come with the packages you need for gaming out of the box. Things like Lutris/vkd3d/gamescope/dxvk/gamemode/mangohud/WINE/ProtonGE, etc.

As someone who shifted to linux over the past year or so there was a metric fuckload of things i needed to learn and things i needed to tweak, especially when things went wrong. To the point i have over 10-20k character count tutorials i wrote for myself whenever i need to reinstall from scratch. These days i can get everything up and running fairly quickly, but that initial learning experience wasn't all fun and games for sure.

I had a leg up by already having my feet wet in linux server/virtual machines, but for someone who's coming directly from windows with zero experience and wants things to just work out of the box i can see why so many aren't interested. It doesn't help nvidia drivers are still horrible(in terms of desktop feel) for one of the most popular desktop environments for windows converts out there, KDE. Don't get me started on how you somehow need to know to disable compositing(or toggle via hotkey constantly like i do when i'm forced to use xorg instead of wayland) if you have more than one monitor in KDE or else your FPS will effectively halve itself.

Linux as a whole has a MASSIVE user experience problem if you want to do anything outside of basic office work and web browsing. Distributions like Garuda(my personal choice) help a lot because they give you the ability to have all of that stuff in the OOBE or an easy to use GUI, but that still only goes so far when little niggling issues crop up and you effectively need to relearn your entire workflow. It's just not something everybody is willing to do for the sake of not having Satya Nadella know when and where they poop.

My biggest hope is valve finally publishing SteamOS as an actual desktop OS. Because i know they could do it well as they seem to be keenly aware of the needs of the average gaming user, unlike most distribution maintainers these days which just assume you're a linux intermediate by default and have completely forgotten the long and arduous path to mastery the OS requires compared to rock-dead-simple windows.

Imagine if MS let them have Halo. The world would be so different. Gamers would have flocked to macs instead of Xbox.

When the game has no official modding support you need base modifications probably already compiled by someone else with who knows really what exact modification.

An example is Grand Theft Auto San Andreas. Base, unmodded game is actually Platinum on Wine's AppDB. But when you mod (by running injecting scripts via a modified dinput8.dll file) the game gets very unstable no matter what mod unlike on Windows.