Proton has changed things pretty significantly over the last few years in this regard. Gaming should be a much more pleasant experience when you do decide you want to give it another go.

For me that day was a little over a year ago. It finally stuck! My games run! Even SteamVR works!

The advent of proton on steam and all the stuff developed for the steamdeck has made gaming on Linux (at least in my experience) nearly indistinguishable from Windows. Very hapy I made the switch

I tried, got sick if having to read multi-step instructions just to install some piece of software.