You know, every 6 months or so I get a sudden hankering to play Portal or something and start down this rabbit hole. Based on your prompt, I had another look today.
So I went and downloaded this "whisky" thing. From their website: "Experience the latest titles effortlessly with Whisky!". OK. Installed.
I open it and I see a window with "bottle configuration" (wtf is a bottle?), an "open c: drive" button (???), "SteamCMD" whatever that is, "winetricks" (??) and a "run.." button which opens a file from finder (??). I have absolutely no idea what any of this is or how to proceed.
Confronted with this and the prospect of hours of research and messing around I decide I don't need to play anything all that much really.
UPDATE - ok, I decided to actually try and get it working and it's not that bad. Follow this video, basically: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xowJ3b-pt-U
And protip, set your system audio to 44.1khz. Cool. Portal.
I maintain the user onboarding could be MUCH more friendly.
Crossover are the primary developers behind WINE and transitively, Proton.
Steam just handles all the configuration elements of proton for the user but essentially it’s doing the same stuff under the hood.
Sorry for the rant, I also hate bad UX. It makes me feel stupid for no good reason.
While it would be great if Valve did what they do on SteamOS and just manage it themselves, it’s a very minor burden to use the existing solutions to do the same.