I assumed you knew I was talking about the DXVK dev given that he's literally an employee of Valve, as you mentioned. Either way, I'll now be more detailed with my comment.

Of course all the contributors to Wine deserve credit too, and I do have an active Crossover license, but Valve are the ones who explicitly made a push for gaming on Linux and focused specifically on the gaming aspect. Wine covers everything, not just gaming, Proton is specifically for gaming. It's doubly true given that they want to sell more units of the Steam Deck so they can get more people into the Linux and Valve ecosystem. Not that you don't know that, but it's worth pointing out regardless.

I've been daily driving Linux since before Proton was even a thing, and the difference between gaming then versus now is not even comparable, it is infinitely better now and keeps improving. I no longer have to hope that a new game will work or that I can somehow manage to get the right set of libraries and flags to get it to run, if a new game comes out and it doesn't have a kernel-level anti-cheat, I can expect that it will work out of the box just fine without any tweaking because I have seen this happen multiple times now. I've even started getting into Mac gaming to get some of that tweaking and configuring thrill back that I used to get from Linux gaming, having to tweak and configure things to get them to work properly or to work even better.

Yes. It's very easy. There's really two ways to do it. You can actually open Steam and add non-steam games to steam if you want it all in the same place. Otherwise you can use something like Lutris, which is what I do. That gives you a nice place for everything also and you can even load your Steam games on. But yes you can absolutely use GOG stuff and exe files.

So, I don't know off the top of my head, but I need to figure it out as well because I have plenty of game installers that I'll want to use eventually. Lots in my GOG account, others from 20 years ago with sources lost to time, lol.

I would expect that Steam could be used as a launcher, but I know there is also an app called Lutris for managing games and compatibility layers and such.

I'm thinking about it, and yeah I may have not yet installed a windows version of a game outside of Steam at all. Honestly I have most often installed Linux native versions via steam.

It's funny you mention the office side of things in addition to gaming, because I have remarked about the same thing.

Using Librewolf(firefox) on Linux, all of the M365 applications work fine in the browser. Probably even better, since I can actually close them when I want to. I use Teams the most, which is obviously a very connected thing. But for a word processor, which seems like the most local thing ever, the web app lets me share in MS format and accept comments and all that.

I could absolutely see Microsoft's execs planning out the most efficient way to grind every bit of value out of the windows brand on their path to subscription everything.