I don't often have time to play games. But when I do, I use Linux. Yes that was supposed to sound like something else. :-) And thanks to Steam, I can play lots of games on Linux. And what do you think powers the Steam Deck?!?!?! :-)
My gaming rig isn't anything too impressive. Partially cobbled together, but a friend gave me a good start. The high-level specs are:
Dual Core i7-7700 / 3.6GHz
16GB Memory
nVidia GeForce GTX 980 Ti 8GB
Kubuntu 24.04 LTS (on 1 TB SATA SSD, most games I play)
Windows 10 (on 1 TB m.2 SSD, only GTA, Destiny, Sea of Theives)
Kubuntu is great, Steam is great, Proton is great, etc. etc. Still, always update; I do it before I play each and every time. This includes checking Driver Manager for updates to video card drivers as well. It sometimes breaks things, but if I'm desperate to play, I can roll things back. Oh, and Steam allows you to choose different Proton versions.
It has mostly been a good experience. In the past, an upgrade to Proton or the game wrecks it. Before being able to choose the Proton version, I'd wait a week and it'd be sorted out pretty quick. But now with multiple versions, the system is hardly ever down.
I do like Skyrim and had played it quite a bit on a PS3. So this is mostly about Skyrim Special Edition on Kubuntu/Steam/Proton at this point. It is hard to find a place that compiles all the tweaks. There is someone maintaining a python app called Proton Tricks. It's a wrapper for WineTricks to be used with Steam/Proton. Use it at your own risk, I make no guarantees. I've not had to do any tweaks since going to Kubuntu 22.04, so that's the end of it for now.
It's not true anymore, but Steam used to not list Free-To-Play games in your catalog. This was annoying when setting up a new machine. But I still like to keep a list here of FTP games that I don't want to forget about.
Destiny 2 (you have to pay for the DLCs)
Neverwinter (not Neverwinter Nights)
Why have just one Appendix? :-P