Is linux actually gaming ready or is it just not for me?
Ill keep it as short as possible, apologies if i keep rambling(ill put my specs at the bottom)
Over the last yew years, i have used quite a lot of distros, from mint (currently my main again), to manjaro to solus to endeavouros and more i cant remember, one thing they all (minus solus) had in commong (for me) was the fact that pc gaming...was horrible on them.
Many hours where spend getting different games to work, or rather trying to get them to work at all, most of them had failed, steam, lutris, default wine, no matter what has been used)
As an example:
Anno 1404 history edition (best anno, fite me), i bought it on steam, tried launching it, didnt work, tried several proton versions, didnt work, lutris, didnt work, i downloaded a crack to see, didnt work either, using a different file format, nothing.
Sometimes i was able to make it work, once and than never again, solus was the only one where anno 1404 worked out of the box, i managed to make it work in endeavouros once by installing two packages i could never find again. (most recently, i bought space marine 2, didnt work and keeps crashing no matter what i do9
But this was the best case scenario, games really work.
As with most things in life, it's probably a combination of factors. But please don't beat yourself up over it.
There's a lot of good advice already in this thread; no reason to repeat it. One thing you might look at the Proton Github issues list. Occasionally, when a game otherwise has a gold rating but I have problems with it, I can find some interesting corner-case details here. Here's a link that you could use to find Anno 1404 issue, as an example: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+"anno+1404"
The other thing I would suggest is that you be more verbose when describing problems. You did a great job sharing the high-level issue and your system's details, but what do you mean by "didn't work"? Does it fail to launch? Does it launch but not do X? Those details can go a long way towards troubleshooting (though I do understand that your post was meant to not be game-specific).
Oh, and stay away from Cracks. Unless you're VERY sure about what you're doing, it's just inviting trouble.
When either of those things happen it is a good idea to run steam (lutris, bottles) from terminal to see what it's trying to do while "not working". Helped me couple times.