Steam for steam games, Lutris for anything else, Heroic for Amazon, Epic and GOG if you prefer it. Roblox is unsupported, but there are workarounds. For online, not LAN based, games, you will need to check title by title. I recommend Are We Anti-Cheat Yet? for this. Other than that, you are almost 100% cool. If you encounter any problem, you will need to check ProtonDB and Lutris/games sites for each case. But nowadays almost anything runs perfectly out of box.

You can check ProtonDB for specificerar games compatability. Most games from steam just install and run as usual. But other launchers and some games with anti-cheat can be a bit more wonky to get running or just dont work at all.

I have been running Linux full time on my gaming PC for a number of months now. I have found only a few instances where a game hasn’t worked. I know that certain games won’t work because of their invasive or Windows specific DRM, but for me personally I don’t want to play those games anyway. Some examples of games I can play without issue: Horizon: Forbidden West, Brotato, Plate Up, GTFO, Dome Keeper, Noita, Enlisted, Power Wash Simulator, Risk of Rain 2 …

Dual booting may be the way to go. Sure Steam, Proton, blah blah but there are so many other launchers and AAA games that are not going to be supported at all (or at least not without a bunch of fiddling). For my own kid, I gave up on Linux ages ago and they have a Wintendo now. I have been daily driving Linux since the mid 90s but I’m also practical when I need to be.

That machine is also isolated on its own VLAN to hopefully reduce the blast radius of whatever garbage it eventually detonates. I make regular backups of it and am ready to repave it at a moment’s notice.

Try Linux in a VM (virtual machine) for a while.

• Low hassle compared to dual booting,
• no risk of Microsoft randomly doing something to windows that breaks your Linux install.
• low/No system downtime if you decide you don’t like one distro or another and want to switch,
• no loss of game data for your son (I’ve lost so many saves because of games putting them in nonsensical places in windows; why is appdata still the default for minecraft saves!?)

Check all the games on ProtonDB, but from what you listed that should all be pretty easy to get working on Linux. 95% of Steam games just work out of the box, with most exceptions being competitive MP games with aggressive anti-cheat. If it’s not a steam game, it’s still likely pretty easy to run, but you might have to use a third party launcher or something depending on what storefront it’s from.

I recommend keeping linux and windows on separate drives. That will save you many headaches.

I have persuaded The Sims to run on Linux; though if the game wasn’t purchased through Steam it can take some doing. No experience with Cities Skylines. Stardew Valley runs very well, I think ConcernedApe releases Linux native versions. My understanding is Roblox deliberately prevents itself from running on Linux. Minecraft Java edition runs on Linux and you’ll find launchers for it in most package managers. An open source alternative called Minetest or recently changed to Luanti exists, but I know it’s not the one his friends play and that’s mostly the point. Can’t say for Stellaris or Slime Rancher.

You might consider Linux Mint instead of Ubuntu. A lot of what you want is going to work (and be preinstalled) right out of the box. It’s a great system to start with.

I play Stellaris and Minecraft on Linux Mint… Stellaris runs fine through Steam. Minecraft, just download the Linux launcher, it will do everything else for you.

From my experience, Cities Skylines works great through proton on steam (it’s a compatibility layer for windows games) and Minecraft has it’s own native launcher (which is downloadable from their site here, you need to use the debian installer for ubuntu). As far as ubuntu native, I haven’t used it a lot. Linux mint is a distro recommended for people who are used to windows most often, you can take a look around.

As far as the other games go, only slime rancher is one that I know doesn’t work through steam. For most games you can take a look at protondb, where you can just search for the game.

There you go https://www.protondb.com/

Also consider that you can just try and if you don’t like it, remove it. It can be a weekend fun exploration together.

I don’t know if you happen to have any other machines available to you, but I do recommend you consider giving it a go on a machine you don’t share with another person, or at least dual-booting on that machine. It could be pretty jarring to be dumped onto another operating system so quickly, especially as one works out how to use the programs they had been running just fine before.

I recently made the swap to Linux myself, and a dedicated laptop for that transition has made my life a lot easier. I still have my old laptop on Windows, heavens forbid I absolutely need it, but I do find some issues with compatibility. As another person has mentioned, Roblox does not offer native Linux support, which means you have to run a program that more or less tricks Roblox into thinking you’re playing on a smartphone. You can do the same for Bedrock Minecraft if you want to play cross-platform.

For a lot of things there are alternatives that tend to work even better in some ways. For others, there are workarounds. And for others yet, you just can’t use some applications you might have been using before.

I don’t mean to hijack the thread, but I don’t want to start a new one for a related question. I understand I will probably have to wipe or partition my primary drive, but will I be able to use my other drives as-is, and have access to all of my files and things?

I guess all those games work out of the box in linux through steam. I personally play just Stellaris from that list, but I do not see why the others wouldn’t.

Dual boot 100% no doubts. Don’t unilaterally impose Linux on your Son, he will likely be cut off from many socialization on current and future popular multiplayer games that may or may not run smoothly on Linux.