These games are all rated gold or platinum on protondb, indicating that they work perfectly for most people.

Hard to say what might be going wrong for you without more details. I would guess there's something wrong with your video driver. Maybe you have an nvidia card and the OS has installed the nouveau drivers by default? Installing the nvidia first-party drivers (downloaded from the nvidia web site) will fix a lot of things. This is indeed a sore spot for Linux gaming, though to be fair graphics driver problems are not exactly unheard of on Windows either.

Personally I have a bunch of machines dedicated to gaming in my house (https://lanparty.house) which have proven to be much more stable running Linux than they were with Windows. I think this is because the particular NIC in these machines just has terrible Windows drivers, but decent Linux drivers (and I am netbooting, so network driver stability is pretty critical to the whole system).

I imagine the people saying “it just works” are saying it because it does, at least for them.

SteamOS is based on Arch, but customized and aimed at specific hardware configurations. It’d be interesting to know what hardware you’re using and if any of your components are not well supported.

FWIW, I’ve used Steam on Linux (mostly PopOS until this year, then Bazzite) for years and years without many problems. ISTR having to do something to make Quake III work a few years ago, but it ran fine after and I’ve recently reinstalled it and didn’t have to fuss with anything.

Granted, I don’t run a huge variety of games, but I’ve finished several or played for many hours without crashes, etc.

I don't have your other games, but I do have a few Worms games and they worked out of the box for me with GE Proton on NixOS.

I'm not saying "you're doing it wrong", because obviously if you're having trouble then that is, if nothing else, bad UX design, but I actually am kind of curious as to what you're doing different than me. I have an extremely vanilla NixOS setup that boots into GameScope + Tenfoot and I drive everything with a gamepad and it works about as easily as a console does for me.

Arch is nice if you want to tinker. Based on your reasoning, I wouldn't recommend it. But if you still want arch-based, I would recommend EndevourOS, and for even a simpler/better distro, Bazzite.

Yeah, the same. I sometimes google "wine WoW issues" and every time there are recent threads, so I don't even try. Linux has the long way to become gamer platform.

You are definitely doing it wrong, I rarely have issues and when I do I just switch comparability tools. I play multiple indie games, marvel rivals, I played lots of among us on my machine in 2020. Running Pop OS

I use EndeavourOS, I just installed Worms and Among Us and they are playing right out of the box for me.

Ironically, quite a few Linux-compatible games only work for me in compatibility mode.

You can force a Proton version in the game settings. "Proton Experimental" almost always fixes any issue you may have.

As other have said, it's usually driver or configuration issue, which is why I prefer using the prebuilt, pre-installed steam deck.

The games don't fail to run because they are so "graphically powerful" they fail to run because you chose to set up your system without the necessary runtime.

There are people who make stripped-down versions of windows. Is it fair to say that because these releases exist that windows isn't "just works" either?

Don't use Arch unless you don't mind spending time troubleshooting and configuring.