linuxmemes

My eve online circa 2008-10 was on Linux, as well as other not-entirely well remembered attempts dating back to around 2005, when I was more interested in spinny cube desktop. Fglrx and I were well acquainted, but not quite friends.

Basically some Source games, Gog's offerings and Guild Wars in-between rounds of tuxkart

Ah yes, mostly Portal and Portal2 and LBreakout2

I hated Windows 8 enough to put up with it at the time. It's nuts how much things have improved since then.

OpenTTD worked excellent on Ubuntu on my Dell E5400 back in 2009-2011 or so.

I started gaming on Linux at the beginning of 2019, that was afaik half a year after Proton was released, and I still remember how rough around the edges it was. Back then it still felt somewhat like a coin flip (the odds in reality were obviously a good deal better) if a game ran. Seeing how much they improved it over the last 5 years is really quite something.

10 years ago back in college I mainly ran Ubuntu and did the windows VM with VFIO GPU passthrough to game on a fullscreen windows VM that got full PCI usage of the GPU, was the best of both worlds

Iirc I did that for roughly a year and then proton hit. It was a bit of a different experience for sure but even at that time it was not all that bad. coincidentally that time also taught me a lot on how to troubleshoot stuff so I suppose it had it's benefits despite the added hassle that it was sometimes.

WoW runs well under Wine without much trouble.

Does Teeworld count?

It was, if you were born in the 21st century.