What does HackerNews think of proton-ge-custom?
Compatibility tool for Steam Play based on Wine and additional components
If you don't care about ray tracing, Linux gaming on Steam is pretty much install it and it works. I enabled the multilib repos in arch, installed steam from pacman and that was it. I was playing games immediately.
You don't need to mess around with lutris/wine, Steam just does it for you with proton. At most you can install proton ge[0] to see if it fixes some problems with proton for the game you're trying. But if the problem is with proton, you'd have the same issues on the steam deck as well.
An experimental patchset for Wine/Proton. Might help with some newer titles, and Steam gives you the choice per-game to target a specific Proton version.
I do agree that the performances are no the same than on Windows (15-20% less FPS on average).
I don't know about the official proton for No Man's Sky, but I used the Glorious Eggroll's fork[0].
Obviously, the installer tries to install and start PB then errors out quite spectacularly, as one might imagine such a program to do in a wine prefix, but then you can just download the PB executable and run it in the wine prefix post-install no problem. Origin plays surprisingly nicely, too, though it generates a total of six windows that you can't close during play or it freaks out. There is some additional fuckery required; Wine's networking needs a bit of massaging to allow BF4 to advertise its ping to multiplayer servers, and you'll get kicked if you've got a ping of "-". [0]
Thing is, though, Proton is Wine-and-allied-trades. In the fullness of time I suspect new BF4 players won't have to jump through these hoops as Proton generally, and its script for BF4 specifically, gets updated. And others are already racing ahead, too, borrowing from and providing for Valve's fork of it. GloriousEggroll, recommended for BF4 [1], is the most robust varietal currently.
Multiplayer in a general sense is going to be a little bit more difficult to enable than merely waiting for updates, IMO. I'm not savvy enough to properly understand the arguments, but I've read that the translation layers for graphics, DXVK et al, could easily be repurposed by clever enough end-users to eg wallhack by making textures transparent, etc
As sibling comments point out, resistance on the part of the devs (or publishers?) to simply enable the Linux support that already exists is probably the biggest hurdle.
I installed Steam on Debian sid via Flathub / Flatpak, and then installed https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom using their flatpak instructions as well.
Honestly, it has never been easier to get a version of proton that makes gaming on linux seamless. Of course, I understand "run these terminal commands" is the usual defensive linux nerd^H^H^H^H coward's reaction, but installing Steam and this package from flatpak and then going from there is a _vast_ improvement from yester-years. I've been fairly happy with it, and I didn't have to do any actual compiling / building!
There are some features that I was never able to get working correctly, e.g. remote Steam Play with Streets of Rage 4 where my friends stream would not load up or controllers would not map, but for single player gaming, this would not be an issue.
Performance is (to be expected) less than Windows and games can exhibit graphical artifacts or crashes but it is not bad enough really complain about given how amazing it is that this exists in the first place. I will often put up with these (imo) minor defects than boot to my Windows install. Steam cloud sync even works correctly for keeping your save data between OS'!
One thing to be aware of that I don't see people mention (maybe because it's a niche setup and game dependent), is that using fractional scaling can completely mess up some games display, I believe due to how fractional scaling uses a framebuffer larger than your real resolution. Make sure to set your scaling to 100% before launching games which have this behaviour, e.g. Tekken 7.