which one is the best?
i3 xfce ... and some i dont even know , yep hipster stuff

Oversimplification, Flatness, and Bloat; but as is art, entirely subjective opinions.

I think Gnome hides too many settings & requires augmentation to be functional, I think the arguments over client side vs server side decorations are stupid & they're causing a schism within the GTK, and for something so allegedly simple it sure is heavy as heck. I have run TWM, it does everything I need within 263 kb. I install Gnome, and it takes 156 MB, for just the basics. Not including Nautilus or anything.

And Nautilus itself pulls requirements totaling 29 MB. The heck does a file manager need with all that?

schism ?:O oh my linux is even more fragmented than i thought
156mb :D rofl thats nothing , did u know modern pc-s can have 16+gb memory easily ?:O

Default prefix is enough to run the vast majority of games. Prefixes can be easily cloned, when necessary.
I expect, that PC gamers are able to use terminal. If not, it is not hard to study some basic things.

Quite often you need to do more complex things to install mods, fixes, etc. for games on Windows.
The same can be said about Windows.
Don't underestimate people.) Telling from my experience, most of them can learn. But of course, they should be willing to. :)

I am attracted to Linux because of how much background resources Windows 10 is using on my PC and the amount of navigation needed to access parts of the UI. I might end up being one of those burnt, toasted, roasted and salty people or i might not. But i will say that as someone who hasn't touched Linux yet it already looks a bit overwhelming, speaking from my Windows-accustomed mind, and it probably isn't.

Do you foresee GOG employing some kind of equivalent to Steam's Proton or incorporating Proton itself or is GOG not popular enough for the development of its own dedicated compatibility layer?

I apologize if I'm not replying to some of you. I click "Post my message" and my reply is stuck in a "Please wait, processing" loading buffer that i keep retrying to no avail.

Like this? I rarely talk in the forums and hardly know how the messaging layout works, in fact i find it confusing.

That is because GOG's forum sucks arse. If there isn't the same amount of opening and closing quote tags, the forum has a meltdown and doesn't know what to do.

Best of luck when going with Linux. It's an excellent operating system. Don't know what was written on the previous three pages, sorry about that, but I would suggest going with Linux Mint. I'm still on it after years, and have found it really good. Very stable, usually easy and straightforward to update between versions, and easy to find help due to it being part of the Debian/Ubuntu family (but not having the dodgy features that Ubuntu has).

Going dual boot is one option, for a period, if you still want the option of going back to the chains of Windows. Another option is to use Virtual Box with a Windows install there. The latter will (probably) not be great to play games through, because it's essentially one OS on top of another, but it can be nice if you want to get a particular software to run without fiddling with Wine, or if it simply won't run no matter what you do in Linux.

Also, for getting 'Windows' games to run on Linux, I highly recommend the excellent scripts by forum user Adamhm here:
https://www.gog.com/forum/general/adamhms_linux_wine_wrappers_news_faq_discussion

And nobody needs that in their brains! ;)

This sounds really promising, like you're going in with your eyes open. You realise what the realities are, but you're willing to try. THat's actually great! It won't be easy at times, but chances are you will find an exact match for your issue on the web and a solution. Which then is usually copy pasted in your terminal. Though anything sudo you should lookup what the command actually does. Sound advice always though :)

Good question. GOG could do it, I don't really get the argument that it costs too much or GOG is too small and there's plenty of demand too. GOG Galaxy for Linux is the most demanded Galaxy feature, by far.

But here I'm talking about solely using existing Proton/Wine to launch games with from a native Linux client. GOG willl certainly not do anything beyond that, that's completely out of scope, and frankly nobody really wants that. We can do with far less. Installing and launching a non-native game through Wine would be nice for offline-installed games too. Similar to what legendary/Heroic does for EGS games. Frankly, it's not that necessary if you know your Wine and prefix setups anyways, but it would make it a lot more convenient. Of course, there's always Lutris which does many of these things already.

Forgetting about GOG for a minute, this is an amazing time to get into Linux gaming. Massive strides are being made/have been made to get games running smoothly, and more is coming this year. This is mainly due to Valve's push for it to make their new handheld successful, STeam Deck. We will see how many people will tinker with it and use the KDE+SteamOS 3.0 (Arch-based) underneath to install software and run commands outside of Steam gaming. It might be a stepping stone for many to migrate.

Yeah, call me a cynic, but recommending plain Wine for newcomers instead of Proton or Lutris is asking for trouble. Not only will games run better due to numerous gaming patches and game-specific patches with Proton/GE/Lutris/TkG custom wines, but they might not run *at all* on plain WIne. And they make it far more convenient too. Using your default wine prefix for all gaming without understanding much about Wine is also asking for trouble down the line. It's just an unnecessary complication and yet one more thing to break and troubleshoot.

Learning and using a new ecosystem and getting dirty with the linux terminal with a new syntax is a far cry from editing config and ini files on Windows. And troubleshooting performance problems on Linux has an additional complication due to Wine/DXVK/vkd3d-proton compatibility layers - very often the issues come from something in their setup or settings, which would not occur on Windows.

I might be underestimating people, but you might be overestimating people :) I hang out in many linux gaming communities and see this all the time - people recommending to dive in the deep end from the start, and then they get overwhelmed and annoyed by so many unsuccessful gaming attempts and failures that they go back to Windows, probably never to return. I would rather paint a realistic picture of what to expect, rather than sugar coat or misrepresent Linux gaming.

Ironically, from my own experience the Linux gaming communities tend to be the most clueless of all Linux communities. Maybe because of the unusually high ratio of self-taught "Windows hackers", the kind to download more RAM or to ask « What is the best Linux distribution for gaming? ».

Discussions related to video games in non-gaming-centric Linux communities tend to go much smoother, and never end up with people "threatening" to go back to Windows.

Users can choose any tools they want to run games on Linux. I don't say that one option is better than another.

I have been using Wine with dxvk for a long time. And every game, I played, is working fine.

Only two of them ( Beyond Good and Evil, Obduction ) required some additional libraries and, therefore, dedicated prefixes.

I think, Wine configuration is simpler, than Windows control panel and system settings.

***

I prefer to manage everything myself, and I like the flexibility Wine provides.

I do a research before installing a game, and select particular mods and patches, which I find useful.

When you know, what exactly has been set up, it is much easier to fix issues, if there are any. ;)

***

However, players who like to have everything pre-installed and pre-configured, can use software, that is appropriate to their needs.

I have never tried Proton, Lutris, etc. Therefore, I am not in position to recommend any of them in particular.)
By "more complex things" on Windows I mean repacking game resources using CLI utilities, modifying binary files with HEX editors and so on.)
Windows has many specific sources of issues on it's own. ;)

Including, but not limited to:

- low-quality, unstable and outdated drivers
- antivirus and proactive defense software
- annoying services ( superfetch, background defragmentation, etc. )
- dependencies on many different versions of C++ libraries and .Net framework
Actually, I recommend to learn from experienced colleagues and well-written tutorials. And don't try to understand everything at once. :)

It is a good idea to start with dual-boot and play only native Linux games first.

When new users become familiar with Linux, they can try Wine and other tools for Windows games.

I still don't get it lol. Maybe I'm just too dense.