I have been a user since around 2000, I work in Linux every day, and I get where you're coming from - but in the context of gaming Linux has really only recently come into its own.

Like, could you imagine, circa 2010, telling a naive user that practically their whole Steam library would work with one click? Wine has always been a minor miracle, but at some point there was an inversion between being surprised when it worked, and being surprised that it didn't work...

As someone who gamed on Linux in 2005, I can tell you that the experience was generally garbage back then.

I still remember making a bug report about the then ATI driver - performance tanked in certain situations in ut2k4, a game with a native Linux build. After months, they released a "fixed" driver which disabled some feature - so the game looked worse but didn't lag.

Then I was trying to get Enemy Territory (and its total conversion TC:E) - another native Linux game - to play nice. I ended up running a second X server so that I could alt tab, but that made sound even more interesting than it already was back then; a friend actually shipped me a PCI sound card to be able to use teamspeak in Linux.

Then came source games, which worked but were choppy and missing some graphical niceties. Then I gave up, bought a laptop so I didn't have to dual boot my pc, and never looked back.

Yup.

Ditto.

Maybe, but this isn’t just any year, this is THE year of the linux desktop.