I just finished playing Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age on Linux. In the 70 hours of playtime, the game ran flawlessly. I couldn't recall a single crash or slowdown.

And guess what? There is no native Linux port of this game! I played the Windows version on Linux thanks to Proton and Steam Play. No special tweaking required, just click "Install" and "Play." My Xbox One S controller was detected automatically, it feels exactly just like playing on Windows.

This could be a game changer for Linux adoption. I bet there are many Windows users out there who want to ditch Windows for Linux and the only thing stopping them is the ability to play their games.

I myself had a dual boot setup with Windows 10 and Ubuntu last year when I found out my laptop with integrated graphics could actually play a good number of games that came out over 3 years ago. I really can't stand Windows and only used it to play games. But when I found out about Steam Play a few months ago and had gotten myself a new laptop, I had to try it out right away and was very happy how well it works. I'm back to a one-OS setup on my laptop using Pop!_OS (which is Ubuntu-based, my new laptop has a dedicated NVIDIA GPU and Pop!_OS has a separate ISO with the proprietary NVIDIA drivers already built-in and it just worked out of the box).

I'm not a hardcore gamer and the number of Steam Play-compatible games already out there is plenty to keep me entertained for years. There's this site ProtonDB where gamers can report how well a game runs on it and whether tweaks are required. Pretty much anything rated as "Gold" or "Platinum" will run straight out of the box. Those rated as "Silver" will most likely run fine as well but may require a few tweaks. I've even read reports of performance on certain games being better on Linux than Windows.

Just to give you an idea of some AAA titles that you can expect to run perfectly or almost perfectly on Linux, here are a few with a "Gold" and "Platinum" rating:

• The Witcher 3
• Sekiro
• Wolfenstein II
• Dragon Quest XI
• Ace Combat 7
• Metal Gear Solid V
• Grand Theft Auto V
• Skyrim
• Monster Hunter World
• The Elder Scrolls Online
• Doom
• Dark Souls II & III

Steam is also constantly making improvements to Proton so the list of compatible games will only improve in the future. It's a great time to be a Linux user. :)