I just use Mint. Just think of Proton as a feature of Steam. I just pick a game from my Steam library and select Force Compatibility mode on and install. Heroic Launcher (for GoG and some other things) is a few more steps, but I didn’t need a guide to figure it out. Heroic lets you choose either Proton or WINE, so I installed Steam first to minimize confusion.
Oh, and another nice feature of Heroic is that it will grab the Linux binary if it’s available somewhere even if that binary isn’t available on GoG. I was surprised that it grabbed the native client for Factorio instead of the windows version that’s on GoG.
The overhead added by Proton, compared to the CPU time consumed by the actual game, is minimal. The greatest benefit is that you don’t have dozens of Windows services hogging half of your memory and CPU.
Some games have some quirks that can cause performance issues when running under Proton. Deathloop, for example, was good on Windows, but unplayable on Linux with the same hardware (Ryzen 5 2600, 16G RAM, RX 6750 XT). There was massive stuttering even on minimum graphics, and every level took several minutes to load. It works now, but since then I’ve upgraded to a 7800X3D, so I’m probably just brute-forcing my way through the same issues.
Probably, but I’m already running ancient hardware and I tend to favor retro and indie games, so I’m not the best to ask about that. Some people do report better performance under Proton though. Windows has a lot of bloat that doesn’t exist with WINE/Proton running in Linux.
It doesn’t get much better than Digital Foundry’s coverage on the matter.
Spoiler alert
Performance is about similar. So no significant performance issues.
