It wasn’t some grand philosophical decision. I didn’t sit down one evening, crack my knuckles, and declare “I shall never use Windows again. I’M GOING FULLY GNU/LINUX” It just… happened. Only partial GNU, (Mostly mesa) but still… The dream is still of course, having full multimedia and entertainment support on a fully GNU system.
It started with curiosity more than anything else. I’d been dual booting for a while — Linux on one partition, Windows on the other. Linux for tinkering, Windows for gaming. That was the deal I’d made with myself. That was the rule. Almost everyone said, it had to be that way.
Back then, Wine was the wild west. You’d spend half an hour getting a game to launch only for it to crash on the title screen, and then you’d spend anywhere. Ranging from 1 hour too 8+ hours on google too, figuring out why, and then it would work, sort of, at 50fps with weird graphical glitches that nobody could fully explain. And you’d feel like an absolute wizard for pulling it off. But you wouldn’t exactly call it gaming. You’d call it digital-wrestling.
Then one day I was setting up a game on the Linux side — I don’t even remember which one, just messing around, not expecting much. And it worked. Not sort of worked. Not “technically playable if you squint” worked. It actually worked. Smooth, responsive, no fuss. I remember staring at the screen thinking that shouldn’t have been that easy.
Proton arrival.
When Valve shipped Proton in 2018 the immediate reaction from the serious Wine community was complicated. On one hand — yes, obviously good. More Linux gaming, better tooling, Valve’s weight behind it. On the other hand, Proton was doing quietly and automatically what we’d been doing manually and deliberately for years. There was a brief, irrational feeling of something being taken away. Perhaps it was the enthusiast part of digitally wrestling with Wine.
People were posting videos of AAA titles running better than expected and I kept watching videos, mostly @PenguinRecordings on YouTube. Anyway i had a growing feeling that the microsoft-side excuses were running out. I started testing things on the Linux partition more seriously. First the newer titles I wasn’t precious about. Then the older titles. Then something I genuinely cared about. No matter what, It kept working.
Proton-GE changed the game again. If stock Proton was the door opening, Proton-GE was someone kicking, it off its hinges. Better codec support, fixes that hadn’t made it upstream yet, that extra layer of polish that turned “almost works” into “absolutely works.” The community around it seemed like, serious people solving real problems fast. I started swapping to it as my default (Reasons above)
Somewhere in that period I booted into Windows for what I didn’t know would be the last time. I was there for maybe twenty minutes. I don’t even remember why. (Probably last league game) Then i rebooted back into Linux, loaded up whatever I was reading or playing, and just… stayed.
The GE Layer
GloriousEggroll’s Proton builds are what happens when someone close to the community, with serious technical depth, decides not to wait. Codec support that licensing prevents Valve from shipping. Patches cherrypicked from upstream Wine and DXVK before they’re stable enough for the official build. Experimental features enabled by default because the people using Proton-GE have already accepted they’re living slightly ahead of the safety line.
Installing it properly — through Terminal or even the ProtonUp-Qt (GUI), managing multiple versions, knowing when to switch between them per-game. Becomes second nature. You maintain a mental map of which titles behave better on which build. You check the Proton-GE release notes the way other people check patch notes for games they play.
ProtonDB becomes a reference you check the way a mechanic checks a manual. Not because you can’t figure things out yourself, but because someone else may have already figured out this specific thing and written it down. The community reports aren’t just compatibility flags, they’re tinkerers documenting their own archaeology.
Launch options that unlock frame generation. Environment variables that add anything from OpenGL variables too HDR, etc etc. Workarounds for games that check for Windows system files that don’t exist and crash silently without telling you why.
What Actually Doesn’t Work
Anti-cheat is the wall and I won’t minimise it. EasyAntiCheat has kernel-level Linux support now and some titles have enabled it, but BattlEye support is spottier and plenty of studios haven’t bothered to flip the switch even when the technical barrier is low. If your primary games are heavily multiplayer with active anti-cheat enforcement. Valorant, certain Ubisoft titles — Linux is a genuine problem, not a minor inconvenience. That’s an honest answer and it matters.
Some games with aggressive DRM behave unpredictably. Some launchers are more painful than the games themselves. There are still occasional regressions where a Proton update breaks something that worked before and you spend an evening bisecting versions to find the one that works. This is the enthusiasts life.
Why It Stays That Way
The thing about building expertise in a system is that the system starts working for you in ways that are hard to quantify. I don’t check if a game is compatible the same way a newcomer does, I look at what engine it runs on, whether it uses a launcher with known issues, what the anti-cheat situation is, and I have a reasonably calibrated sense of what I’m walking into before I touch it.
That knowledge was expensive to acquire. It compounds over time. (Worth it)
Windows has gotten better at some things. It’s also gotten more aggressive about telemetry, more insistent about its own ecosystem, more difficult to own in the sense of actually controlling what it does on your hardware.
Linux gave me back that control in exchange for expertise I was always going to develop anyway.
I didn’t plan to stay. But I understand exactly why I did.