People who use Wine (Proton really) + Steam don't use Wine to run Steam itself, they run the platform native Steam client which manages the Proton installations

People who use Wine (Proton really) + Steam don't use Wine to run Steam itself, they run the platform native Steam client which manages the Proton installations (multiple versions) for them. So everything is native, up until game launch, then Steam launches the game via Proton (Wine). It works really well, considering what it is doing. I'm playing all sorts of games on Linux and my Steam Deck that I didn't even dream of being able to play before (including playing through Portal 2 on my Steam Deck currently :) ). I'm not alone in this, you can browse a user-sourced DB of experiences over here if you want further proof: https://www.protondb.com/explore?sort=popular https://www.protondb.com/explore?sort=popular Everything rated gold or above runs really well and you don't experience any problems at all. Silver is mostly working ok, besides some edge-cases or aggressive anti-cheats stopping multiplayer from working.