I also remember that “magical” moment — Proton really took away the pain of dual-booting and separate Steam for Windows. Doom/Nier run like a charm, and now it's increasingly a case of “install and play.”

A couple of life hacks, if they come in handy:

In the game properties, try Proton Experimental or Proton-GE — it often fixes finicky titles.

Check ProtonDB before installing, there are working launch parameters there.

For comfort: shader pre-caching, FSR/Gamescope, MangoHUD (fps/frametime).

If you run into anti-cheat issues, check if the game has support enabled; many already have it built in.

I also tried https://www.jenny-mods.net/ and was pleasantly surprised.

Linux gaming is now truly “plug and play,” and it's awesome.

I completely agree, all games on Steam can be modded. I recently tried https://www.jenny-mods.net/ as an experiment and was pleasantly surprised that everything worked.