Every single one of these can be played on Linux. Every single one, I wager.

And these days with 3rd party tools such as Lutris or Heroic, it's press one button to install and another to play. Some might need some tinkering, not gonna lie, but currently it's becoming more rare.

I guess what you mean to say is that those games are not available on Linux natively. But native Linux gaming is kinda...well, to be honest, dying due to the absolutely awesome state of Wine/Proton and DXVK/VKD3D (i.e. get Windows games running on Linux through DirectX to Vulkan translation layers). Maybe in the future it will pick up as the Linux gaming marketshare grows, but for most people it doesn't matter as long as you don't need to have Windows installed anymore to game.

It's worth exploring Linux gaming. You'd be surprised how smooth things are these days.

In any Linux computer I use, only install the native version of games cause I'm lazy as heck. But "absolutely awesome state of Wine/Proton and DXVK/VKD3D" is a understatement, it freaking amazing black magic what it does.
I didn't use DXVK for a long time because I tend to be quite sensitive for latency and frame drops and most online stuff we see, the only metric to compare both versions are average FPS wich I can't care less unless the overhead is too big (if you do not understant what I mean, look at dual GPU setups). After start using it my opinion has changed, even fighting games I tested behave very well under DXVK. It's freaking amazing the overall performance of Windows games on Linux.

rojimboo, what on Earth are you talking about? There's no option to download a Linux version. You can just get a .EXE file, and if you try to run that in Linux, you think it will work? As as far as Wine, I'm not going to emulate Windows, because the only way I'll let Windows run is 100% offline, but I have Linux running online, so that's a problem.

EDIT: I just looked up this Proton, so it's what, like an emulator? If it emulates just the software then that might work but if it runs or emulates Windows itself, then that's no good for me, because then Windows will be doing all of the horrible stuff that it normally does.

It's kinda a emulator but not really.

From what I understand, it's a real-time translation layer from Windows and Microsoft DirectX to open API's such as Vulkan. It indeed create a "drive C:" and folder tree (called prefix), install and uses a couple of components of Windows to be able to translate the calls but it's just some files, DLL's and stuff that it's needed to function. It does not completly install Windows.

If you are worried about telemetry'n stuff, note that plenty of Linux native games use active telemetry the same like in the Windows version. Wine/DXVK (Proton is Steam complete package with Wine/DXVK, D3D-11 etc) is not built for privacy but that doesn't mean is Microsoft like (as far as I know it's the second biggest western company regarding data harvesting).

In programming we'd probably call it a wrapper. Where you wrap a library's API and calls from say a C library to the local language, doing the steps intermediate and the appropriate calls to make it work. Pretty sure that's what it would be.

It's even in the name; Wine Is NOT an Emulator". And Proton is based on Wine.

KVMs and other virtual machines emulates the whole underlying hardware architecture (like Arm or x86-64) in a computer and creates a complete environment, whereas Wine only, as mentioned, just translates certain calls directly (though, still via the OS to access resources).

(Kernel-based VMs are even faster as the OS itself is taken out, this improves latency and such, which makes them much much faster than even normal VMs and Wine)

The first one is like creating a full office space or a building for a huge company (say "Fish Mongers LTD"), while the other is just like a table on the street handling simple one-to-one transactions, like selling/buying fish or vegetables directly to the customer...

EDIT:
QEMU with libvirt/vfio seems to be the most optimal when it comes to games yet having Linux as a base, but requires more to setup initially. One can even copy the image and have a backup ready in minutes it the first one crashes.

It's layered like this:

| Windows with games |
\ QEMU /
Linux
Physical HW

Dark_art_, that's interesting about how it translates between APIs; I didn't realize that anything like that existed.

Typically I just play games in Windows, and just offline, because I'll never trust Windows with the Internet - that's why not Wine. I'll be busy this morning so I won't get a chance to do any testing, but maybe this afternoon or otherwise tomorrow, I'll try to install Windows on another partition that I happen to have lying around (unfortunately a small one, but it's manageable), and use that just to test it, and see where to go from there.

May you have good luck.

...While I'm going to wish you good luck, I neither see causation nor correlation found in your reasoning; WINE isn't going to give Windows applications some magical access that you wouldn't have otherwise granted them.

Well that may be true. I just don't know enough about Wine. If it's basically a part of Windows then I don't trust it unless I can be sure that it doesn't contain telemetry. I suppose I could possibly just install Linux and WINE, and keep it offline, and just use it to play games rather than running Windows directly. Still, I've never used it and don't know much about it, and I don't know whether it would run everything as reliably as Windows itself does. It's worth a try if all else fails though.

Let me slow you down there, speed racer.

Wine is Not and Emulator is very literal.

Quote the description: Now, it isn't perfect. And it won't run everything perfectly. But it sure as heck will run a fair number of Win16 programs, which no modern Windows can.

As for telemetry, I'm going to be a bit brutally honest, I don't know what you're on about there. Wine is an open source reimplementation, cleanroom style.

Minesweeper isn't going to magically gain the ability to spy on you as there are no hooks for it to do so or interact with the internet in the first place.

Right, on-the-fly is the main clue here.

The only telemetry that might be in there lies within (i.e. programmed into) the games/programs you run through Wine, and not within Wine itself. As always, if it's closed source, you just have to trust the developer(s), or not.

In fact, Wine is the most safest way of running Windows programs, short of cutting the cord out. Next thing would actually be to go full open source on Linux in true RMS style and go completely offline, which would be kinda extreme.

As a further addendum, one could entirely lock out Wine from accessing the internet via Linux's very robust firewall controls, if one felt the urging paranoia to do so.

Darvond, well I know it's not an emulator but the way that it's been described makes it sound as though it acts like an emulator. Other than that, I'm not sure how to categorize it. I wasn't aware of those details though. And I could use a Firewall, but I'd rather have the whole partition not even given Internet access at all, because then I'm sure that it's secure.

sanscript, I don't think it's extreme to take it all offline, because I can boot into one partition which is allowed Internet access, and another one which isn't.