My biggest pain point is that some of the mainstream multiplayer anticheat implementations don't work on wine. I'd like to be able to play Tarkov or Hunt or Apex on Linux, but I can't. So far, I have just not played those titles, even though I really want to. I don't really want to have to dual boot just to play them, because Windows 10 messes up my EFI booting. I used to run Windows with a GPU passthrough, but I stopped doing that once proton came along. Maybe I'll look at doing that again, though it was hell to set up on Gentoo at the time. Maybe other distros have smoothed that out a bit? It's been like 6 years since I did it the last time.

I know the wine guys have been doing great work trying to get anticheats working in wine/proton. Hopefully that progresses well. Getting anticheat to work in wine would really be the best.

"just work out of the box" is an overstatement.

I ran Manjaro for about half a year recently, including using it for gaming. Very few games actually worked out of the box for me, including games with so called "native" Linux support.

I ran into multiple games with "official" Linux support that were simply broken or became broken by an update. Some of those that weren't broken had significant performance issues (that Windows on the same machine didn't have).

Is it possible to game on Linux? Yes. But at the very least it requires fiddling. As much as I love Linux, gaming is just a lot easier on Windows.

The annoying bit with those is that they are Steam only. I try to avoid Steam and instead buy from GOG because they are DRM-free and i keep offline copies of all of my games, but Wine still (just tried yesterday the version Void Linux installs in a VM) seems to have issues even with slightly older games.

There used to be a way to run Proton outside of Steam but i think it is now discouraged.

Neither of these issues have been resolved by Wayland on my modern Thinkpad 490. There is still awful screen tearing when watching videos and trackpad multitouch gesture support is still a mess on Linux. Gnome 40 added some gestures for navigating the desktop but beyond that the situation is horrible.

Screen tearing isn’t gone, unfortunately. Watching videos on my Linux machine is a pain. I use a Lenovo T460s and I’ve spent too much time looking for a solution (more then an hour). I like the freedom of a Linux OS (i3m is cool) but it looks so bad compared to MacOS.

Wayland is great, however it also makes screen recording more difficult.

It isn't whether it is smooth or not. The issue is the mess that is multitouch gesture support on Linux.