Or has it been that you have to use a special distro or spend countless hour configuring your own?

This hasn’t been true for some time now, with only the very rare exception. Ubuntu for example works out of the box. It is becoming a somewhat common phenomenon to see proton outperform windows.

The largest problem is denuvo (which is gross on any OS) since it unfortunately locks Linux gamers out of many popular games.

Edit: I may have misinterpreted your comment. Perhaps you were saying that Linux only beats windows in game performance when special distros and tweaks are used. I’m sure this is true in some cases. Apologies if I didn’t contribute anything meaningful :(