This is an advanced task, and if you want to focus on games, this so wrong it hurts. Most new games (and especially AAA titles) need a substantial amount of work to run well on the part of the proton (and sometimes game) developer, very few have good support, less still without some performance penalty, and even less within a few months of release. Thats before you run into driver oddities, and good luck with multiplayer.

The idea that you can slap wine on the few things that you need is a weirdly repeated fiction, it wont make it true by repeating it, stop doing it.

I've never used proton, that was just heresay feom my gamer friends using steam decks. I remember having problems with wine in the late 90s but the single data point of that xml app was really good. I guess I just got lucky. Running a windows vm in linux has never worked as well as the ither way around, but it does work. And for people with critical software that runs on w95 or some version of dos it isn't unusual to keep it in a vm with extremely limited connectivity. Do you think that might be a reasonable approach for the gp?

I tried Wine for a variety of things in the past, but never quite could get it to work right.

Also, some of those software are mission-critical for me, and I can't really afford to use something that may break unexpectedly when I need to deliver images same day.

Sounds like you know what you are doing, wasn't trying to guilt trip anyone, just provide options. Despite the topic of the thread, windows is a much better os than it ever has been. If it is still possible to keep an install on some (potentially older version) running in a vm that would be sufficient mitigation against unscheduled MS decisions interrupting your business. I'm not an IT professional though, I just code.

No guilt trip involved :) Thanks for the suggestions!