I have played around 20+ hours of Path of Exile on Linux (Pop!_OS) with zero crashes or compromises. It plays about as good as one could hope for with all the eye candy cranked up on my Ryzen 2600x and GTX 1060 6Gb setup.
When you start the game for the first time Steam will pop up saying its going to do its magic and presto bango you are up and running moments later. There is nothing special you need to do yourself to get it running on Linux.
With my 20+ hours of playing Path of Exile on my Linux machine I never once experienced so much as a single micro stutter or anything else for that matter that would take away from the gaming experience. The only thing I could say is to set up your graphics settings before logging in to the game. If you try to setup or change your graphics settings while logged into the game you may experience a crash or a lock up.
I would also add to just make sure you are running the latest version of Steams proton.
Path of Exile Settings on Linux
These are the settings I used for my normal game-play as well as for the video I made to show it running nice and smoothly on Pop!_OS.
Path of Exile is a lot of fun even as someone who never really played the top down style of games in the past. I had quite a bit of fun doing the quests and getting my minions to do my bidding for me. 🙂
If your someone who likes this style of game play and is running Linux as your OS and haven’t given it a go yet you should for sure give it a try. Steams proton has come a long way over the last bunch of months and is making more and more games run great straight out of the gate. We now just need Anti cheat software developers to get on board and make us a Linux version so we can get games like Battlefield 5 and The Division 2 running on Linux.
Path of Exile running on Linux (Pop!_OS)
Steam has a curated list of games that are compatible with proton that you can check out. You can also visit Protondb for a list of games that users have tested and rated. The options for Linux compatible games has never been greater and continues to grow every day.