Having had consulting jobs working with Windows servers around 2015, this was ruined for me. Sooo many ancient out of support 2003 severs. Seeing it actually triggers some light anxiety ("oh no not another one!")
As a competitive old school arena FPS guy, I have also had a very hard time getting the same smoothness and low latency (input, output, whatever it is) on Linux. The games I play are very fast and twitchy, and milliseconds matter.
There seems to be too many layers and variables to ever get to the bottom of it. Is it the distro itself? Is it a Wayland vs. X11 thing? Is it the driver? The Proton version? Some G-SYNC thing? Some specific tweak that games based on this game engine needs?
> It's a complete dealbreaker for competitive play
Very true, and this is the biggest issue for me when it comes to gaming on Linux. And it's not just raw FPS count. You can usually brute force your way around that with better hardware. (I'm guessing you could probably get a locked 60 in Street Fighter 6 even with a 30% performance loss?). It's things like input lag and stutter, which in my experience is almost impossible to resolve.
If it weren't for competitive shooters, I could probably go all Linux. But for now I still need to switch over to Windows for that.