Most people I know are more than happy to pay that premium compared to the hassle of dealing with Linux. Also, a lot of those savvy enough to use Linux will just crack Windows or get a key at a discount through a reseller.
It’s very rare to have issues if the game is rated Platinum in protondb and sometimes a setting in the Steam GUI needs to be changed if it’s gold or silver.
All in all I find it significantly less annoying than dealing with Windows’ ads and forced updates.
Performance can still be an issue, mostly because the Nvidia graphics drivers are performing worse on Linux vs on Windows.
For example, it would mean every graphics card driver that supports opengl is an emulation of opengl.
This is an outdated take, from my perspective, as someone who is an avid gamer and who is running only Linux at home currently. While no doubt it's easy to find problem games, the point of the very article this thread linked is that it's come such a long way that the majority of the top titles in terms of hours played on Steam now work in Proton.
There's been a few examples where people have compared the performance across games and found it's basically tied in the majority of games but occasionally there will be an outlier that plays better on Windows. Less often, there will be an outlier that plays better on Linux.[1]
If Valve sorts out the Anti-Cheat stuff, the number of games that don't actually run (and run well) on Linux could drop to near zero.
Proton isn't really emulation; a better way to think of it is that it's a compatiblity layer, much the same way DirectX, Vulkan, et. al, are compatiblity layers.
> Most people I know are more than happy to pay that premium compared to the hassle of dealing with Linux.
This part is more likely for far more users. However, it misses the point entirely. For a great number of years, as a gamer, I had to keep around a Windows system in order to partake in my hobby. That's not really the case anymore.
I can see how something would be rated 'platinum' for linux still be unacceptable in those ways. If your playing a single player game I can see how it's ok, but not for twitchy multiplayer games like MOBAs or FPSs.
Due to macOS not supporting Vulkan and other stuff required for Proton, it's been on the backburner for support from Valve for a while. Portal 2 can't even run on macOS anymore since it is 32-bit only. Most games work how they would on Windows when running under Proton vs a native port, you should try it on a Linux machine when you have time.
You should give it a go (even on the same hardware) on Linux.