It's as good as any other distro, in to say pretty good. There are some cracks that just refuse to work in Linux, but most are pretty easy to get going.
Same here. Haven't even thought about pirating games because Steam is just working.
Seems to me that Spotify and Steam has been really successful preventing piracy in music and games, but the streaming movie industry has failed because they got greedy.
Yeah steam does it very well. On stuff like the switch, the prices are so crazy I immediately go hack my console. But in steam, prices were so much lower to the point in which I never thought about it.
I only recently started doing it when I noticed some games block you from playing offline.
i use steam+proton to run cracked steam games on my deck quite frequently actually. just gotta add em as non-steam games and tell em to use whichever proton version
I run arch exclusively and find gaming to be pretty seamless and enjoyable, but it does require some config. This is mostly because arch makes no assumptions so dependencies installed by default on other systems are likely not present unless you installed them.
I suggest running Lutris since it handles wine prefixes. Wine prefixes essentially do the work of keeping your individual game installs compartmentalized so each game has all the required dependencies to run properly.
Regardless of whether you use Lutris, the maintainers of that software have good documentation on installing wine and its dependencies here. The guide has a section for Arch and is particularly helpful for ensuring you have all appropriate vulkan or nvidia drivers and driver dependencies installed.
Best of luck if you decide to go down the arch path!
Steam is available on most distro repo's and even if it isn't install it via flatpak and off you go
once you've done that goto settings and steam play and there's a option there something about "use proton for all unverified games" or something, I'm not at my pc to get the direct wording and then you'll be able to install any game from your library and play it
you can use protondb.com to check if games you want to play work on Linux with proton
It works fine. You'll likely notice a slight decrease in performance and a lot of the time you'll be using Windows versions of games instead of native Linux titles because that's what's available. Sometimes Lutris install scripts won't play nice with pirated game installers so you might have to look at the script and see what tweaks it uses.
I'm not on Arch, I'm on Gentoo, but I'm using Flatpak, so this should apply to you too.
Just get Bottles.
I've tried it on:
Assassin's Creed 1
Assassin's Creed 2
Nier Automata
Nier Replicant
Crash Bandicoot
Dishonored
... and probably some other titles I can't recall on top of my head.
The gotcha is that you may have to install the right library dependencies (e.g. DVDX, .NET, Mono, Redistributable C++, probably fonts), which can be done on the Bottles.