Which makes me both happy and concerned. On one hand, I am finally able to use my main computer for gaming without having to deal with dual booting nor emulation (in the VW sense). On the other, Proton completely kills native Linux porting. Amnesia The Bunker being released only in Windows despite the developers' long story supporting Linux was likely influenced by this.
I’ve grown comfortable with the idea that the win32 API is simply a gaming runtime now. I’m okay with this situation because A) I don’t have to give up any performance (or at least none that I’ve been able to measure) and B) the Proton/WINE stack is still open source all the way down.
It could certainly be argued that I’m doing some mental gymnastics here, but I look at Proton/WINE as simply being part of the game engine. Traditional engines like Unity/Unreal have all kinds of translation layers and indirection.
If it works, it works. Proton isn't going anywhere; even if development is abandoned old versions of Proton will still exist, so games that forewent native Linux support in favor of Proton will still work.
On the other hand, I have Linux releases from GOG which no longer run (sadly, I cannot remember the specific example where I first encountered this). It is expecting some specific version of library X. Theoretically, I could run it if I booted up an older Ubuntu release (assuming I could still install all of the dependencies/drivers?).
