I have a cheap samsung laptop with an intel iris gpu. Not a proper gaming laptop. This was an emergency replacement for a broken macbook a few years ago. It came with windows and I booted it once to download a manjaro image and put it on a usb stick. Long story short, I'm back on a mac for work and the laptop is now used for some light gaming. Steam installation on Manjaro was easy. It's basically arch linux and that's the same OS that the Steam Deck is using under the hood. It works great. I'm actually considering getting something a bit beefier at some point. Possibly with some VR goggles. I'm pretty happy with Linux, and not having to deal with Windows is very nice.

The nice thing with lots of users now doing this is that it is becoming important for game developers to ensure their stuff is supported on Linux as well. That used to be something that few developers cared about but this is actually turning into a large enough chunk of users that most of them will probably want to make sure their stuff works. And the good news is that it is not that hard. It mostly just boils down to testing and fixing bugs. There's no good reason for them to not do that. Even if it's just 1 or 2 percent of users, that represents some serious revenue for some of these games.

Apple apparently is paying attention because they launched their game porting toolkit over the summer. Which, despite the name, is actually quite similar to Proton. Early days but it looks like MS is losing their monopoly on PC gaming. I run X-plane 12 on my M1 macbook occasionally. It's a pretty capable machine. It would be interesting to see if Valve is planning something for Macs now. It's a nice market. Lots of wealthy users that think nothing of spending a few dollars in the app store.