What would the best approach to gaming on Linux be?
If you use a bleeding edge distro you will be in a world of hurt with broken drivers and so on
Even if you can run a game native is it better to run the windows version of it in wine or a virtual machine? (Linux or windows)?
Or can you run in and steam in a chroot with an older version of Linux?
What would be the best approach as things seem to break a little to often on arch (and similar distro's).
Or would dual booting with an older version of linux be a better idea?
I really don't want to have to go back to windows.
UPDATE:
So i have an nvidia card, the worst possible thing to have on linux, I tried playing portal and it said you need to update your drivers. Okay easy enoough i when to update my drivers (Manjaro) and i\I was using the newest ones (proprietary) so i enabled the testing repo and everything broke. X wouldn't start and stated that no screens where found. I wiped all the config files and then the max resolution was set to 800 x 600. I downgraded my repos and it was still broken, in the end i switched to nouveau drivers; and of course i can play games with them. I have had these issues wit arch (and manjaro) in the past i think i will have to use windows for gaming until i get an AMD card.
TL;DR if you can, use an AMD GPU if you want to run linux.
I use steam on arch and have no problems at all. If everything is working with your DE/WM and the drivers (I disagree that this leads into a world of hurt on a bleeding edge distro!) then its only depending on the implementation of steam and the native game-code itself. CIV 5, XCom Enemy Within and X³ were the (not mini-indi-platformer-whatsoever) games I played the most. And everything works just out of the box like in windows.
Non-native games I still play on windows (dualboot) - since I need it for making music anyway (and since I get a free licence as a student from my university). A simple VM-solution (like just Installing VirtualBox without any clue of your hardware) would only be sufficient for small games that don't require to much performance.
Native Steam runs fine for me over different distros and the only issue I have ever had is a locale problem with some older games that needed generic US-UTF8.
If you are thinking of doing the chroot/wrapper method then you're still going to have to update distro specific libraries within the chroot from time to time.
In this case I would setup a debian (steam supported) distro like steam OS as your gaming partition/machine.
This way you will initially use a similar amount of hard-drive space.
BTW, there's nothing wrong with using windows to play games :D
Use the normal "testing" kernel, avoid breakage by having the Arch LTS kernel (atm 3.14) installed and select the one you desire at boot. If you need windows to play games, virt it, and get a crappy GPU for linux and passtrough the better GPU to your virtual machine.
go for bleeding edge then use latest technologies, using a bleeding edge distro with the bleeding tech doesnt really break a lot, I have run fedora rawhide and not had many issues, also ran Arch unstable and nothing super bad, helped me learn though