YMMV of course but I was playing Timberborn just the other day on Mint, on an Nvidia card, through Heroic. Proton seems to have been a gamechanger. I have just made my first steps into switching my daily driver myself. I may have been lucky but all the games I have wanted to play have worked so far. I also have a Steam Deck, which is what has encouraged me that it may be possible.

I second containers. I use Unraid and have found it pretty simple to get started. At one point I was using a vm on unraid as my gaming machine, although I have moved away from that and now have a low power Unraid server for hosting.