I've been using Mint OS for gaming and it's been perfectly fine. I probably can't play some burning edge, this year games, but everything else has been fine. And I'm free from Windows garbageware.
As a noob to Linux and a very casual/ infrequent gamer, I have a question for you. I recently made the switch from Windows to Mint (dual boot so I have a fall back) and found that I can't play half of my steam games on it. I was surprised by the quantity since I have read a ton of comments referencing the high % of supported games. Much of my library consists of the indie genre, could this be the reason why I have lower playability? Or could there be some add-on that I am missing?
Most of Steam games rely on Proton for support. You need to enable it in Steam's settings, under Steam Play.
You can check how well a game runs on protondb. Some games may require additional steps to be playable (using a specific version of Proton, installing something), protondb reports most of the time include required information.
You need to enable it in Steam's settings, under Steam Play
Honestly, this needs to go away, there is never a scenario where Linux gamers only want to play some of their games. There should be instead some pop up window for non proton verified games instead of an obtuse setting.
NGL, I play games off of Steam, which is easy mode. You can run the Windows game off of Proton, which is Valve's program for Windows to Linux gaming. Did you try right clicking on the game in Library, going to Properties, then Compatibility tab, then choosing Proton. Almost always the newest version of Proton (8.0-3) will do the trick. Rarely the experimental version or an older version is better.
Adding "gamemoderun %command%" [without the speech marks] to the launch options usually improves performance.
There's a bit of learning curve, but you can do it, comrade.