Couple technical nitpicks.

First it's debatable if Proton existed long before Steam Deck. I'm not sure the exact timeline but I think it was created as part of the Steam Box effort which wasn't all that long ago. On the other hand though Wine which Proton is built on top of most certainly has existed for a very long time before either the Steam Deck or even Proton (I have fond memories of LAN gaming with it back when Diablo 2 was new).

Second Proton doesn't enable ARM (at least by itself) so that claim is a little misleading. There is a project to realtime translate x86 instructions into ARM but that project (Box86) although it fulfills a similar role and could be used in conjunction with Proton isn't actually Proton. Using Proton by itself will not enable you to play x86/Windows games on ARM.

Lastly Proton is kind of irrelevant to the whole Linux vs BSD thing. Technically what enables that is that both implement POSIX standards plus use mostly the same libraries, frameworks (like Vulkan), and applications. Yes running Proton on BSD will let you game on BSD but that isn't really a result of Proton doing the work so much as it's a side effect of the fact you can run Proton on BSD in the first place. Additionally while there are technical and philosophical reasons why the distinction between Linux and BSD is important, practically speaking they're the same thing these days. OpenBSD isn't that much more different from a Linux distro as one Linux distro is from another.

Years ago I made the switch to Linux, then I wanted to play WOW again but it would not run on my Linux machines, so I started to dual boot. Then I began to wonder why I was keeping Linux installed.

Eventually I made the shift to macOS because I worked in theatre and needed it for specific Mac only programs. But I still have a Lenovo legion that I am getting ready to swap over to Linux (not that all of the games I currently play do not run on macOS or my steam deck).

If I was able to get WOW running on Linux years ago I likely never would have swapped back to windows. And I am currently trying to convince my son to install Linux on his pc running windows 10.

Do you know what I did last week thanks to Proton? Installed EndeavourOS on my freshly purchased laptop, installed steam, and installed a bunch of Windows games. Then I played them. At no point did I wonder whether they would run.

Now, you may think being able to do that isn't something that is going to get more people using desktop Linux (or that it hasn't already done so), but as much as I'd love to agree with you, then we'd both be wrong.

I say this as someone who used to care about convincing other people to use Linux. (Before shifting into "you can lead a horse to water..." mode, and now I just don't give a shit.)

However, what I gained from that experience is this: In twenty years of being Linux-only on my personal desktop, the number of times I have read the phrase, "I'd love to use Linux, except for [some statement about a game or games]" is astronomical.

Now, is Proton going to make desktop Linux the best choice for everyone? Clearly not, duh. But it is remarkably disingenuous to suggest that it's not had a massive benefit to the Linux community and ecosystem as a whole, including, and dare I say especially, desktop Linux. It is flat out impossible to imagine that a substantial portion of current and future Linux users aren't people for whom Proton solved what they considered to be a substantial barrier to usage.

This makes Linux desktop a viable option for millions of users where it wasn't before. It's absolutely a battle between Linux and Windows.

I played WOW under Linux since open beta of WOW 1.0 until the first expansion, after which I quit it. The performance probably wasn’t on bar with Windows, but besides some problems after some of the patches, the stability was rock solid even in 25-man raids.

Hackintosh is a thing (or at least used to be), but it’s against the EULA.

macOS has been free for, like, 15 years.

Yes, you have to already own an Apple computer, but Apple users don’t pay for OS upgrades.

Technically, anyone could download the OS images, but there’s not a lot that non-Apple users can do with them.

Fortunately Valve publishes monthly hardware statistics so we can back claims with statistics. Linux comprises 2.89% of their surveyed share. Of that 28.31% are using Steam OS. Using the wayback machine we can check the statistics from last year. Checking the July 2024 results using the Wayback Machine shows Linux at 2.08% with Steam OS comprising 40.97% of that.

From that we can see that Linux is growing, while Steam OS is becoming less of a contributing factor to the Linux share.

Yeah, the big reason to do that was so you could attach an EGPU which wasn’t supported natively. Now it is, though, so the need for that mostly disappeared. Plus, macOS is now so reliant on proprietary interval hardware like the T2 chip, then I won’t run on anything, but Apple hardware.

macOS has been free for, like, 15 years.

Yes, you have to already own an Apple computer, but Apple users don’t pay for OS upgrades.

Technically, anyone could download the OS images, but there’s not a lot that non-Apple users can do with them.

I've tried switching to Linux on my home desktop several times over the last 3 decades, but because I always use that machine also for gaming it always had some Windows in a dual boot configuration and I always found myself not really booting Linux more than once in a while.

Since my last switch, maybe a year ago, even though Windows is still there in duat boot, I've only ever booted it once and that only to move some data files which were in the main windows partition over to a data partition I have in a seperated drive (were most of my data files already resided but a few were still elsewhere) so that I can cleanly share it between both OSes.

Whilst I know more than enough to muck around with Linux and Wine configuration (and for example had to do the latter to get a pirated version working of a game I have in Steam whose official version won't run in Linux no matter what I do), it's very seldom that I actually have to do it (and I don't just use Steam with Proton but also Lutris with Wine for GOG games), whilst in my previous try maybe 5 years ago getting anything but DOS games to run under Linux was a major PITA.

Anybody can download Windows images too. That doesn’t mean the OS is free.

The big reason to make a hackintosh was to use eGPUs?

eGPUs were not supported natively? And now they are?

What timeline are you talking about here? Is it all back 10-6 years ago?

macOS is included with every Mac, not free.

Maybe, because I haven’t looked into it in a few years.

the deck is a gateway drug for linux

In my experience, it's not actually Proton specifically but more generally Wine along with DXVK and Vulkan itself.

I have as good a success rate with Windows games from GOG under Wine through Lutris (which also defaults to using DXVK and Vulkan plus has Wine configuration scripts for most GOG games, making their install fully automated and zero-configuration) as I have with Windows games from Steam under Proton.

If I understand it correctly, Proton is mainly a fork of Wine with Steam integration thrown in and changes to make sure it works with specific Steam games, so I don't think the improvements are Proton specific, but rather more global than that (the use of Vulkan instead of OpenGL, DXVK allowing DirectX games run with Vulkan, Wine improvements).

Mind you, if improvements in Proton are flowing to those other projects and having a big impact, then credit were credit is due for Proton pulling up the whole ecosystem, otherwise Proton isn't actually as crucial in improving Gaming on Linux as seems to be portrayed in so many posts here.

I can understand that if all people have used for gaming in Linux is Steam and never games from other digital sources - like GOG or even pirated games - via launchers like Heroic or Lutris, it might seem like Proton is the secret juice making gaming under Linux nowadays a vastly better experience than before, but in my experience in the last year of gaming in Linux, a good laucher using Wine + DXVK + Vulkan works just as well as Proton.