Lots of discussions on this already, NoTuxNoBux and all that, but one thing I think is often overlooked is that Proton/Wine enables treating closed source games a bit like emulation roms, thus freeing the system around it to innovate.
What I mean with that is that binary backwards compatibility is a sort of poisoned sweet of the Windows world. It has resulted in the monstrous instable thing that Windows is, but admittedly is much better at running a few years old binary only software (although not perfectly though, ans in some cases WINE is better already).
In the GNU/Linux world backwards compatibility is usually much less of a concern as with open-source software a library dependency is usually fixed quite easily.
But with closed source game ports it becomes quite apparent that this model doesn’t work with unmaintained binaries, as Linux game binaries very often become unusable very quickly.
Of course in an ideal world all software was FOSS, but in our less than ideal world we need to think of ways to deal with this fact.
Of course GNU/Linux could become more like Windows in that regard (worst outcome IMHO), or some sort of containers could be wrapped around those games that include the older libraries.
Or we could just consider old windows games to be similar to ROMs for emulators and run them through Proton/WINE…
P.S.: in before WINE Is Not an Emulator ;)
You’re correct with Wine safety. It basically just parses the exe files, extracts their code, creates a native Linux process with the code, and provides its own implementation of the Windows API to it. This code can be any valid CPU instruction and it could theoretically even do native Linux syscalls and make use of other available APIs on the system. There’s little reason for a program to do that, but it’s absolutely possible. You should secure Wine processes just like you would secure native Linux processes, because they are exactly that.
Newer Proton versions run it in a
sandboxcontainer though. I guess that functionality is also available in WINE these days.I don’t think Proton does sandboxing. It uses the Steam runtime and Valve is working on some containerization thing to support x86 games after distributions fully stop supporting x86 libraries, but as far as I know it’s not out yet
The container thing is enabled by default in Proton 5.13 and later I think. Maybe sandbox is too strong a description but (to my limited understanding) this container also somewhat limits what the windows binaries can access.