Honestly, with Proton, the answer is “many of them”, so it all depends on your personal taste!

My current highest Steam counter goes to Stellaris, the Paradox 4X space strategy title.

Factorio is pretty fun

For me “best game on Linux” basically just means “best game” since everything I play runs perfect of very close to perfect.

That means Terraria is the winner for me. Best game of all time IMO, and it has a native Linux port that works great.

@IndependentRanger too many to list, but my money goes to RimWorld, No Man’s Sky (via Proton), Stardew Valley, TMNT Shredder’s Revenge, Axiom Verge, Hollow Knight, Starbound, Valheim, VVVVVV, VirtuaVerse, Celeste, Undertale, Crosscode, Crypt of the NecroDancer, Dead Cells, Jupiter Hell, and a few other games that escape me at the moment.

Stardew Valley

Morrowind (via OpenMW) is a classic. I’ve put in quite a few hours into Terraria as well. Through Lutris/Wine, I’ve also been enjoying the classic infinity engine games (Baldur’s Gate, Icewind Dale, etc).

I’m assuming you’re talking about native Linux games?

If so, KPatience. lol

Rimworld.

Kingdom (and the follow ups).

Civ games.

Night in the Woods. A story based game with cute art and amazing characters.

FTL has held up surprisingly well

Kerbal Space Program has been consistently my most played native Linux game, followed closely by RimWorld.

My top 3 are:

1. Slay the Spire
2. Celeste
3. Into the Breach

2D indie games, that will run pretty well on a laptop with no dedicated graphics card.

Oxenfree and Hollow Knight are two of my favourite “current” games. Can’t wait for Oxenfree 2: Lost Signals to come out in a month or so…

Though Oblivion, Skyrim, and Borderlands 2 might be the ones with the most playtime.

Nethack variants like Unnethack, Slash’EM and Dynahack are a perennial favourite on any OS since Hack on MS-DOS in the 80s and Nethack on the Amiga in the 90s.

• super tux cart
  • … I actually was surprised by the maps with cool shortcuts
  • nice singleplayer experience, if you just want to chill while listening to some of your music offline
• Zero-K in case you miss supreme commander / like managing a robot army
  • some robots are cheap and expandable, some are expensive and have special abilities that require micromanagement.
  • I personally play in skirmish mode against bots
• 0AD if you like micro manage your own RTS population
• minetest
  • minceclone2 “subgame” to get somewhat interesting mobs
  • I wrote some mods for it myself in lua, adding static blocks is way easier than adding any kind of intelligent mob

My current game rotation:

Guild Wars 2, Dead Cells, The Binding of Issac and Civilization 5

Two native and two via Proton, it is amazing as a non-programmer how good Proton is. They run like native and rarely have to fuss with anything. I might be lucky with that but Linux gaming has really covered a ton of ground in a pretty short time frame.