How much is the speed drop from translation using Proton? Is it so big or just small?

Honestly, in some cases, proton is faster than games directly on winblows. Microslop even said they're going to try to make windows faster than proton again.

For the most part you would just build the same machine as if it was a Windows gaming machine. That said, there are a few things to know:

• AMD has historically had better video drivers on Linux than nVidia, though nVidia has made some changes that has improved things quite a bit
• You want a basic, well supported common distribution if you’re not extremely familiar with Linux. Don’t go with some weird niche distro because you heard it will get you 1% better frame rates. Things like Steam and Lutris are well supported on the common easy distros. I would suggest Mint as it is Debian based, and basically everything supports Debian derivatives.
• Not every game will work, but a whole lot will. The things that are most unlikely to are competitive online games with anticheat root kits. If those matter to you, then unfortunately you’re better oft in windows.
• Take a look at https://www.protondb.com/ for a list of what is well supported and any information if they need some trick to run.

Most games I just click play and they run.

Ryzen 9 x3D, XFX Radeon 9700 XT, 32 GBs RAM, with some flavor of MSI mobo I am too lazy to get the box out to look at.

It took me like a year to build as I was saving for all the parts (and the everything crisis began, at the time called the RAMpocalypse). I think it was around 3K to build then including the 2TB M.2

I'm never going back.

I get better performance on Linux than Windows.

The significantly lower system overhead more than makes up for the translation layer.

I mostly game on Steam, occasionally Lutris. The only thing that just plain wouldn't work was Control from Gog - I probably could have gotten it to work if I played with the configuration. But I didn't really care that much.

Not sure if you've chosen a distro, but I can vouch for CachyOS being pretty decent. There are more stable (i.e. non-rolling) gaming distros, but CachyOS doesn't take a huge amount of tinkering, and most things truly just work (I've actually had some games be less buggy on Proton than native Windows).

Go back in time a few years when it was affordable.

Some tips for you:

• Check game compatibility using https://www.protondb.com/ this will let you know if the games you want to play run on Linux and how well they do so

• Buy an AMD GPU, support for Linux is great on them, miles ahead of nVidia. If you already had an nVidia card it's usable, but if you're starting fresh 100% AMD.

• Don't fret too much on the distro of choice, not sure how familiar you are with Linux but because of the questions I assume not much. If this machine will also be used as a normal computer prefer a general use distro (my recommendation would be Mint), if you'll plug it on the TV and use it as a console prefer a gaming distro (I've heard good stuff about Bazzite but never used it myself). You can have / and /home be different partitions, this means that you can distro hop and maintain your games, saves, and most configs from one distro to the other, or even when reinstalling the system, I strongly recommend people to do that.

• Linux is not windows, things are done differently and that's okay. A lot of the frustration of new users comes from trying to do things the windows way and failing miserably, e.g. trying to install programs/drivers by navigating to a random web page and downloading a binary.

Good luck, and ask any more questions you might have.

Others have commented on performance, so I don't have anything to add. The parts/cost is really large and varied topic depending on what you're trying to do and what your budget is. And pretty much every part of my rig has gone up in cost since I got it, so no idea what it would cost to build at this point, but more than I'd be willing to spend.

So I'll just cover a few things you may run into issues with when trying to game on Linux.

Anti-cheat: Some anti-cheat software is not compatible with Linux or the developers didn't properly set them up for Linux. There isn't anything you can do to work around that. Just the way it is.

Some launchers/DRM: Ubisoft and EA seem to be big ones for launchers that are broken regularly. There may be others as well, but those are the ones that come to mind. You can sometimes get them to work by switching to different versions of Proton, but it can be hit or miss.

Niche gaming hardware: Some niche hardware like steering wheels, shifters, pedals, flight sticks may have some issues. Some work right out of the box, some work but can't have software/drivers updated, some can't be customized because of proprietary software that is windows exclusive. This hobbies have some pretty dedicated fans, and more of them are making the transition to Linux. So you might be able to find assistance here on Lemmy or on various forums if this is something you're trying to get working.

You may run into other minor issues but there are a ton of resources out there to get games working. Most will rum pretty much like they are native. I think Linux is a fantastic platform for gaming, and it will likely continue to be better as more people adopt it.

Games that run on Linux are about as fast on Linux as on Windows. In fact they tend to run a little faster on Linux.

Use AMD CPU and AMD GPU for the smoothest experience.
AMD CPU is more reliable, and Radeon graphics have the best support for Linux.

It is estimated that around 12000 Games work on Linux, or about 90%. For specific game compatibility you can always check protondb. Notice though that some games that have native Linux versions are also on ProtonDB, so you should check on the steam client first if there is a native Linux version.

https://www.protondb.com/

PS ProtonDB state the number of games that are verified to work as almost 9,900, and playable as almost 30,000 😎
But Platinum or Gold rated games are only 60%.

Personally I generally check ProtonDB before buying a game, but it's been quite a while since there was something that didn't work.

try to have only one graphics card or something that can "mux" properly on linux.

try not to have secureboot for the Mobo.

EDIT : Check the driver compatibilities for all your components.