Be ready for shit to just not work for you

Pretty sure neither mint nor PopOS supports VRR natively, if that is important to you. HDR only works well on Bazzite in gaming mode in my experience. Bazzite is great. I highly recommend it.

Older games are hit or miss. If we're talking Steam games prototondb.com is the single best resource. If we're talking GOG or games installed from CD-ROM or something it may be a bit harder to get working perfectly. Often GOG's remasters will work great minus controller support. I still can't get LEGO Island working :( Feel free to DM if you have questions. I'll try to help best I can.

Proton makes things super easy for the most part. I mostly only game on my PC and ended up distro hopping to bazzite. It's mostly setup for gaming out of the box and is atomic, updating similarly to a console. I've found it relatively hard to break and easy to reset.

As most have said here, it mostly boils down to anti cheat

In my opinion linux runs old windows games better than windows itself. When I was on XP I used to play games like Starcraft and Lemmings Revolution which absolutely refused to work on Windows 10 after I switched, even in compatability mode. Later when I switched to linux, they worked great with Lutris with very few issues. Linux is great for older games. For newer games, Steam has most bases covered and worked ootb.

My experience over the last few years of Linux gaming is: with Proton, it's mostly a matter of It Just Works™.

When it doesn't, switch to Experimental, and then usually it works.

Compatibility with older games is fantastic, too.

The exception to this are games which require kernel-level anti-cheat. This is a security nightmare on Windows as it is, and it simply doesn't work on Linux. Luckily, these games are few -- but they do tend to be big (e.g. Apex Legends).

The EFT devs have their heads very far up their asses when it comes to Linux. They specifically banned the platform and have deleted forum posts about the topic. Fuck em, there are better games in the genre by this point (Hunt Showdown runs great on Linux for example...)

It's at the point now where I just assume a game will work and am rarely disappointed.

Often the games that "don't work" still run just fine, but the developers that use anti-cheat will stop you from playing.

I'm no good for compatibility layer help, but for an open source Lightroom alternative, I really like darktable.

The best resource for multiplayer games is https://areweanticheatyet.com/. Every game with nonworking anti cheat will be impossible to get working.

Others have listed ProtonDB, which is an absolute necessity. Tweaking Proton versions and the like can be tricky but not too bad, especially if you're used to using a PC.

There are also tools like Lutris and Heroic Games Launcher for third-party titles and further Proton support.

Oh, and there are also community-made custom Proton versions, such as ProtonGE, which can help if a game is giving you a lot of trouble.

Nice thing about having a dual boot setup is that you can play most of your games on Linux, and then just boot into Windows to play live service games with kernel anticheat. Best of both worlds!

Do the dual boot and test it. For now, it's mint when I want to tinker and be happy 1 game out of 300 works, and windows when I want to actually play any games.