How is Proton a technology/library/sorftware? I got the impression it's just a preconfigured Wine, but not an actual implementation. Sorry if I'm misinformed.
And _if_ that's true, I'm sad about the credits not going to the Wine team.
And _if_ that's true, I'm sad about the credits not going to the Wine team.
The 'secret sauce' is actually 'Steam Play' which is the automated wrapping, configuration and execution of Proton wrapped games without the user having to do anything (other than a confirmation box to confirm that a compatibility layer is being used).
The Steam Play component turns it from a 'nice meta-distribution for wine' into 'killer quality of life improvement'.
(Not asking you to do research on demand, just in case you already know...)
Steam Play is part of the Steam client, so is proprietary. ProtonDB isn't open source but does data dumps to github regularly [3].
[0] https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/
[1] https://github.com/doitsujin/dxvk
I guess it somehow makes sense for Valve to keep the per-game tweaks private. With all of that money they're printing though, I sure wish they could feel that they could afford to be less defensive.
I think this will make game preservation easier in the near future.