I've gamed my entire life on Windows until about a month ago, when I switched due to my dissatisfaction with it as an operating system (another thread, another time). After years of hearing that gaming on Linux was improving thanks to Steam Deck and Proton, I took the plunge and installed Pop!_OS on my desktop and loaded my favorite games. Holy smokes, it's amazing. I haven't found a game yet that's required any custom tweaking; download the game through Steam, let it install whatever it needs to on first run, and away they go. I'm blown away.

However, I want to start exploring Linux-native titles in a more deliberate manner. Do many others here game on Linux, and if so what are some of your favorites that you would recommend now that the Steam Summer Sale is on? I mostly gravitate towards builders and colony simulators, RPGs, and 4X games, but I'll take any recommendations that people are excited to share.

Inspired by the recurring topic every Steam sale over at /r/GameDealsMeta:

• What are some lesser-known Steam games that you recommend?

• Are there any genres you’d like hidden gem recommendations for?

If you're interested in previous Hidden Gem topics, you can find them here.

For popular recommendations and general purpose sale discussion, please use the main Steam Sale topic.

An update for this topic: I've always used the number of Steam reviews for a game as a rough proxy for the game's audience size. It's not perfect, but it works well enough. Steam effectively made this canon in one of their recent sales. They had a Hidden Gems category and then broke the game list out into different tiers based the number of reviews each one had. I saved their taxonomy so I could use it here.

Feel free to tag or group your recommendations based on these if you like:

All the categories above, except for the last one, are how Steam defined their different tiers. I have some qualms with them using "Cult Classic" there, but I'm going to follow suit for consistency's sake.

I myself added the last category, because I think there are plenty of games worth mentioning with more than 1000 reviews that still have a solid Hidden Gem vibe but have since found bigger audiences and "graduated" from the label.