I wonder what ever would make savegames incompatible between systems. Endianness? That should be handled by wine. Different path separator? I would think it's up to wine as well. So... unreported bugs in wine, or is there something fundamentally different about game state?
I'm guessing most saves--besides some really old games--are probably fine on a fundamental level. But even if a save technically works, the effort it takes to find that save in your old windows filesystem, then place it in the new location in your linux filesystem is actual quite substantial, especially when you imagine doing that for an entire catalog of games that you've played over the years. And if you're relying on steam cloud saves to keep track of it then you can expect to lose the saves for many of your games when changing OS. If you're looking to retain saves, its far from a simple migration. Which is another reason why I have trouble making the switch entirely.
That reminds me: a few years ago I got bored of playing Skyrim on my Xbox 360 and I wanted to play with mods on the PC. I didn't want to build a new character, but turns out that there are tools to extract Skyrim save games from the Xbox and are perfectly compatible with the PC version. In fact, not having a Windows installation at home I managed to play them with Skyrim on wine under linux. Everything worked pretty much flawlessly, mods included.
> the effort it takes to find that save in your old windows filesystem, then place it in the new location in your linux filesystem is actual quite substantial
That shouldn't be an issue either. Steam ought to be handling game saves anyway.
