Hi,
I work as an IT specialist and I encounter a mix of different operating systems. My T14 ThinkPad (Ultra 5 225U, 32 GB DDR5) has a dual-boot Windows 11 and ZorinOS.
I went on vacation recently and wanted to game. I had ZorinOS installed and tried multiple games from my Steam library. I was shocked, utterly shocked by how badly all of the games ran. My ThinkPad isn't made to game, but holy crap I was planning on playing some old games like Resident Evil 6, Fallout NV, Resident Evil 4 (OG) and Cities Skylines.
None of the games ran as they should with the exception of Fallout NV, which had issues playing back videos and had weird graphical artifacts. I installed CachyOS since that is the recommended gaming Linux distro for performance. Eventually I gave up and installed everything on Windows 11 which I use for work. Surprise: everything worked perfectly out of the box, no tweaking necessary, with much higher and stable frame rates.
As a person who works in IT, I find it disingenuous when people recommend Linux for gaming in any capacity. Why would you switch to an OS where getting games to run often requires tweaking games to function at all, not to mention that you can't even play some multiplayer games due to kernel-level anti-cheat? Any gains you get from a lightweight OS get destroyed by the Proton translation layer on old hardware.
I know it's a small sample size, but these are old games that should work out of the box and not require me to lose time on each just getting them to work decently. Even the idea of suggesting less experienced users switch to Linux for gaming under the guise of better performance and no Micro$lop telemetry is deceptive at best. Not to mention all of the issues you can experience and performance loss if you dare to run an Nvidia GPU.
tldr: games ran like crap on my t14 ThinkPad while running ZorinOS/CachyOS, switched to Win 11 worked perfectly.