I can't say I play a lot of video games these days. But I do use Linux, and I do play the occasional game of Lix or join in on lan parties at my house for different games.
Generally, things have gotten pretty good. I last used Linux (KDE) around 2010 for a while, but it felt very clunky so I went back to windows. Now I'm using Mint, and it is charming. I find it much easier to understand what the computer is really doing in the background and therefore fix problems when they arise. On Windows, things were randomly hidden from me and some things were way too hard to do.
Things that work for me, though I'm hardly an expert. (Some of these may be obvious to you or unnecessary depending on your previous Linux experience. I've been using Mint for the past year, which is the majority of my experience. So some of these lessons I learned the hard way.):
- If you're new to Linux, figure out right away how to kill programs that are causing problems. Usually problems don't happen, but I was frustrated when I instinctively tried ctrl+alt+delete and it didn't work. This is especially useful when using wine, because programs under wine cause lots of problems for me when they don't work.
- I use an Xbox controller sometimes, I've surprisingly never had any problems with it on Linux. I did have to install the right driver, though.
- Wine is generally 50/50. Usually I've found that when it works, it works well, but for some games it just won't work at all. (Actually, sometimes things work better in Wine, which is surprising. A game who's binary I'd compiled some years ago ended up corrupted, I was never able to play it until I tried running it in wine, and somehow that fixed it.) I recommend using PlayOnLinux, which is a friendly program that manages versions of wine to figure out which one best to use. (Sometimes updates to wine break compatibility with games that previously worked well, so PlayOnLinux looks up what version is known to work in a database and downloads that one, IIRC.)
- Install at least two versions of Steam, one native Linux and one under wine (probably PlayOnLinux); use the native one for running games that run natively on linux, use the other one for running games that require wine. I recently spent hours trying to get Borderlands 2 to work on wine, only to find out that it runs natively on Linux.
- For native linux non-steam games, you may have to build from source a lot. On the bright side, you get to have access to the latest development version! On the other hand, building from source is a real pain and the latest development version is usually super buggy. But on the other other hand, it's much easier to build things from source on linux than on windows. Scanning through the README.txt file for what libraries to download and for the magical command to type into the console will work 75% of the time. (I usually give up the other 25% of the time.)
- If things are working okay, do not update your graphics card driver. Just to reiterate: if it ain't broke, don't fix it. I regret every time I ever updated my graphics card.
(Just back up your documents and get comfortable reinstalling linux. I've had to do that a few times. It's been 8 months since my last reinstall, so I think I've figured things out a little better.)