I’ve played Deus Ex (and the revision mod) and Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory on Linux without issue. If you’re playing steam games it’s basically just install and play. Especially for old games.

There’s a website called protondb.com you can check for compatibility. Gaming on Linux is so good now though, I don’t even check anymore before buying games.

Word of warning though. While modding games running through wine/proton is possible, mod managers don’t usually work or are tedious to set up. I don’t mod too much so I usually just manually install or stick with steam workshop mods.

Up until recently I was using a gtx 1060 just fine. Not sure about the high end ray tracing stuff though.

I’d say give it a try, I had a great experience. Never had any proton issues with an nvidia card my self. Just keep in mind nvidia drivers on Linux are notorious for being bad. If you choose an LTS distro or one that packages the drivers you’ll be fine though. Pop!_OS LTS with the nvidia drivers is what I ran.

The learning curve is actually pretty manageable. Took me an afternoon to be good enough to create lab reports for Uni. Creating your first template takes a bit but isn’t super hard. Afterwards you can reuse that and only need to tweak.

This is the Tutorial I used. For an editor I’d suggest VSCode with LaTeX Workshop. (There’s also LTeX which is a great grammar and spelling checker)