Myself I favor Dash to panel, different icon pack and maybe some other theme. Thankfully, there are plenty of options out there.
What I like the most is the responsiveness. I'm working with 8GB RAM and while Pop OS is not exactly what I would call light out of the box, it is snappier than something like Manjaro.
Also, I'm keeping an eye on Solus Budgie as I was pleasantly surprised, but it certainly needs improvement. Clean distro with impressive boot time.

Windows should be better at telling why some game does not work on it.

Microsoft has gone out of their way to prevent even simple errors from giving details; it's really agonizing sometimes.

Does Linux cause problems for game modding at all? Like, do mods for Windows games have problems if you try and use them with Linux games or something?

I agree with you on the auto-play feature. I always turn it off, for any website.

NoScript does an excellent job in my view and by default it can downright break websites.

uBlock Origin actually has some pretty neat feature built in. You can set custom rules, block domains locally or globally, block JavaScript and so on. It's an intricate piece of software, more than an ad-blocker.

I totally agree with you - in this case it is not an issue of being GPU bound for sure. That being said, even in other DX12 games VKD3D-proton does not currently fully exploit the capabilities of a GPU - particularly (older) Nvidia cards seem to be a problem.

I have been using 100% Linux for many years and what I will say is that I don't feel there is anything I want to do that I can't do in Linux, which I would be able to do in Windows. For the non-game applications that don't have Linux versions, there is pretty much invariably a Linux-native (usually libre/open-source) alternative available that works well.

As far as games, I find that most games that aren't Linux native run very well in Wine. I have played some 12-15 Windows games in Wine over the past 2 years and didn't have issues running any of them. I played Batman: Arkham City a couple of months ago and it worked great. I'm currently playing Detention, Commandos and Temple of Elemental Evil.

It seems likely that Wine will give better compatibility going forward for older Windows games. Also, imo, Linux has strong benefits in terms of freedom, security and general lack of 'bloatware'.

No not really. Anything that needs a Windows installer can be run with Wine. The rest are just copy paste jobs with mod files, aren't they? No difference to windows in that case.

For example Grim Dawn mods work fine with the GOG version. You just use wine with the same wine prefix on the installer.

I wonder about Steam Workshop though with something like Skyrim. Hm. Steam is native on linux, but is the workshop integrated when installing mods? Would it use Proton even then? Probably not.

In any case, you could just go to Nexus Mods to manually install the mods.

I claim that Linux is better on all fronts.
So I’m curious about the factors I am probably ignoring, allowing me to make such a claim ;)

(it’s obvious we won’t convince each other on this kind of subject, this is nothing but genuine curiosity)

I also claim Linux is better on all fronts, a superior OS to windows. The only way Windows is "better" is that more things are designed to run on windows, but that isn't a fault of the OS. And with Proton and Wine, most games can run just fine on LInux.

Anything else, there is usually a free Linux alternative to whatever you need.

It might be interesting to include Mac in the comparison as well.

Not usually.

For games that run under Linux natively, a mod that modifies the .exe, or that involves custom .dll files, will not generally work. (With that said, games written in C# may be exceptions thanks to mono; Celeste mods work on Linux for this reason, I believe.)

For games that run under WINE, it would generally take a .exe mod that uses a function that WINE either doesn't implement or implements poorly for this to be an issue. The Temple+ mod for Temple of Elemental Evil is an example of this sort of mod, as it changes the rendering engine. (It's likely to work if you have a recent wine and dxvk, however.)

I actually have used it to:
* Block the part of twitter that gives news updates. (Worth noting that I did this sometime before the 2020 US election, and it made my twitter lurking experience much less stressful.)
* Block that cat picture that appears on Reddit's sidebar.

I think it is already good at that, to the point where I recommend it over native Windows in some cases. For example, it's probably easier to get Exile: Escape from the Pit working on it. (Exile: EftP is a freeware (formerly shareware) game that was later remade under the title Avernum, and then again under the title Avernum: Escape from the Pit. Some people prefer earlier versions of this game and its sequels for various reasons.)

Problem is that a lot of business apps are Windows only nowdays.

probably cause windows is better os