It's easy to offer a better experience if you also own the actual storefront; that was kind of my point.
And as I said, I'm sure Valve contributes; but describing wine as some sort of semi-usable half-working project before their involvement is rather inaccurate.
i disagree. wine worked, but many games didn't. fixing that is mostly valve's doing. and in my opinion the wine experience is still inferior compared to steam.
the problem is very much one of perception. 90% of the work that went into wine was already there. but the remaining 10% of work that was missing make up 90% of the impression of how well it is working. (the numbers are made up, but i hope you get my idea. it's the general linux desktop problem. the desktop is functional and stable, but the impression of it isn't because of a few small issues that just seem to bother many people)
so by attacking these remaining issues, valve is making a significant contribution.
i think it is also important that valve is able to apply patches before they make it into wine, because that means these patches see way more testing than the wine project probably would be capable of on their own. which is another reason that makes vales work significant.
The proton work is open source (and readily installable without using the storefront), so you can actually just look and see that they did, in fact, fix many little bugs that break games - perhaps only many hundreds, rather than thousands.
last time i tried that, i could not figure out how. any pointers?
It should be noted that it's perfectly possible to release your game on steam in a way where the steam client doesn't even need to be running in order to launch the game. The choice to tie Steam's service into the ability to run the software you purchase /seems/ to be a decision made entirely by the people publishing their games.
If that's the case, you should really be more concerned about that behavior rather than Steam's DRM existing. Don't buy games whose behaviors you disagree with!
That's the thing with desktop linux: almost everything already exists. But there's always an extra mile to go. Sometimes it's tiny bugs, sometimes it's bad default settings, sometimes it's questionnable UI... all things that may not be a problem for tweakers but will stop people that want a good out-of-the-box experience. I'm glad commercial companies go that extra mile.
But yes, props to wine devs. Well deserved.