I’ve recently moved my whole game library over to Linux and stopped dual booting. Everything runs great on Linux, I just run it through Steam’s Proton layer.
Therein lies the problem. Even my non-Steam games I run through Steam since it’s so convenient with Proton. My experience with using straight up wine, winetricks, Lutris etc. had been much more clunky in comparison and less reliable for getting things running.
While it’s working fine for now, what do I do if I’m offline and Steam decides this is one of those days offline mode doesn’t work? What if I get banned from Steam?
Has anyone had any luck replicating their Proton setup outside of Steam? Or simply just running a Proton game outside of Steam after getting it set up using Steam?
They’ll streamline better over time. These open source WINE frontends/orchestrators may as well have 2 eras, before and after Proton. Before Proton they had little developer interest so development was slow. After Proton, influx of users and more developers interest in working on open source Linux gaming tools and Lutris rapidly got better and Heroic popped up. PlayOnLinux got left to historic obscurity in the history of Linux gaming
So I’m not concerned about Steam reliance. Everything outside of Steam is so much easier because of Valves open source contribution and the growth of the community. Pretty much because of Valve, Lutris/Heroic/etc became better at a faster pace and will continue getting because of what Steam did for Linux gaming in the past decade