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Valve has been doing a lot of work here lately, they've essentially made Wine into a first party citizen of Steam (in the form of Proton). So Wine is stable & easy enough for non-tech users - at least for gaming purposes. But there isn't the equivalent for general software yet.

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They just opened proton to non steam software in the latest beta. And from what people have been posting it works with a lot of windows applications.

That said, I was attempting to run a Proton game a few weeks back and it kept failing silently. Running from the terminal revealed a missing dependency, which I apt-getted and now it works fine. So while I agree that Proton is fantastic, there's still some work to be done in making it more friendly for "non-tech" users.

Is it not the case that if you use the steam runtime then libraries should be there? Ultimately valve are targeting steamOS not linux as a whole. Some linux distros (eg arch) have a package that bundles the steam runtime which should make such issues go away.

Steam runtime doesn't have every lib ever made, can collide with libraries in the system, and game devs might not include some dependencies because of licenses without notice. I think GP had the latter case.

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