Work and work well are two different things and most importantly the question is what’s in those 72% because you have like 1% of Steam games which have like 80% of the player base at any given moment and a lot of AAA titles and popular multiplayer games don’t work on Linux or can even get you banned if you play them due to anticheat issues.
Also if you bought Windows 7 so far you could’ve updated it upto 11 without paying anything extra if you leveraged the update Windows that Microsoft offered.
Out of the top 10, 6 are “No Go” and technically 7 if you count the fact that the player count for GTA V is based on GTA Online which still constantly issues bans when running on Linux due to anti cheat mishaps.
This list also overlooks other very popular games that aren’t on Steam like Call of Duty Warzone and Fortnite…
> This list also overlooks other very popular games that aren’t on Steam
Well yes, it is, as the title makes pretty clear, the top 50 games on Steam. That said, non-Steam games can work just fine with Proton, wrappers like Lutris make this only a couple clicks more than Steam.
Fortnite is limited by EAC: https://lutris.net/games/fortnite/, and I'm not very familiar with Warzone but I suspect it's a similar situation.
Non native multiplayer games are quite often a no go, which was my gripe with putting GTA V on the list since the concurrent player base is nearly all due to GTAO and if you run it on Linux through proton you risk a ban.
Most work quite well in my experience. I have run into small issues, like videos not playing, and sometimes games do not run at launch and take some time to patch, but all in all gaming on Linux has been a surprisingly good product experience.
My only issue is that multiplayer still won’t work e.g. for games that use EasyAnticheat or other software that doesn’t have native support for Linux or you’ll get banned or kicked the latter of which happened to me in a few titles over the past 2-3 years.
Basically unless they have a native version or a developer which officially endorses proton MP is often out of the question because it either won’t work/ban risk or the game doesn’t have client anti cheat detection which means in many cases it would be ripe with cheaters.
Also if you bought Windows 7 so far you could’ve updated it upto 11 without paying anything extra if you leveraged the update Windows that Microsoft offered.