Well, I"m sorry your experience was bad. I assure you, it is not normal what you are describing.
Valve has (figuratively) bet the house on Linux as tomorrow's gaming platform... and I'm confident they would not have done so without Linux being ready for prime-time.
As a note, don't game under WINE. WINE is great for applications and such, but a game designed to run on windows won't work quite right even on WINE. But, if you install the Native Linux Steam client and have Steam download/install the Native Half-Life 2 for Linux... I assure you, it works flawlessly... as-does all Source games now, Unity games, Unreal games, CryTek games (or at least they can be ported native now).
> I assure you, it is not normal what you are describing.
Phoronix seems to assure otherwise. It feels like every day I read about a minor performance bump with RadeonSI and then a 10fps regression. The proprietary drivers are clunky and don't seem to play nice with my multimonitor setup. Needless to say, my attempts on Ubuntu 14.04 this year on my very standard i5 3570K / AMD 7950 rig have not been very successful. I had this one awful text rendering bug (artifacting) with both the proprietary and apt-get open drivers. Only when I compiled Mesa from Git did I fix it. Taking a step back, running Hackintoshed OS X felt more reliable in the 3D graphics department, and I used it for over 6 months before dropping back to Windows 7 full time.
I wish, wish, wish to use Linux full time. I really do. I'm sure if I had older/integrated graphics hardware my problems would disappear. Unfortunately I need dedicated hardware to drive a dual link DVI (Korean 27") and two more HDMI/single link DVIs.
I'm sure the driver support will come with time. Maybe around the time Wayland/Mir take off. I'll be waiting. My MacBook is my rock, of course.
Valve has (figuratively) bet the house on Linux as tomorrow's gaming platform... and I'm confident they would not have done so without Linux being ready for prime-time.
As a note, don't game under WINE. WINE is great for applications and such, but a game designed to run on windows won't work quite right even on WINE. But, if you install the Native Linux Steam client and have Steam download/install the Native Half-Life 2 for Linux... I assure you, it works flawlessly... as-does all Source games now, Unity games, Unreal games, CryTek games (or at least they can be ported native now).