But I cannot even remember the last time Proton was not able to run a game. It must've been years ago.
For a while I checked ProtonDB before buying a game - I don't even do that anymore.

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/08/farlight-84-is-now-broken-on-linux-steamos-steam-deck/

(You even commented on the game not running before writing above comment...)

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The gist of everything is that for anything serious to happen, the share has to rise.

I agree with that.

But.

If we're now shouting
"Just use Proton! Don't do ports! Ports are bad!"
... I fear, developers might later, when the share has risen, just say:
"Just use Proton! We don't do ports! Ports are bad!"
It's what Linux gamers said! For years! Right?!?

People used to try to push the doors open for Linux being a first class gaming system.
I agree with you that it might have been mostly futile. I know for sure that it wasn't 100%. (I am at least responsible for one port, just by friendly nudging.) But yes, I don't think it accomplished much.

But what people are doing now, they're Linux gamers mind you, is pushing the doors in the other direction.

If you're fine running your games with Proton, alright. No problem with that.

But would you then just leave the doors to first class Linux gaming as they are?

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I might split my answer into side-track and the important stuff.

Obvious side-track:

Nowadays not only "I can run it." seems to be enough for most people.

I am going to assume the first "not only" is too much, otherwise I don't get that sentence.

It's supposed to bind the sentence to the next one. I'm no native speaker, but I think it should work out in context:

Nowadays not only "I can run it." seems to be enough for most people. They even started to actively ask developers to not port games.

(emphasis added)

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The state of affairs in Linux community saddens me as of late. So much to say but I am clearly in the minority. Never mind...

You're not alone.

We used to point out games not working well natively on Linux for what they are: bad ports.

We used to ask for ports for each and every game we wanted to buy.

Nowadays not only "I can run it." seems to be enough for most people.

They even started to actively ask developers to not port games.

They even started to attack fellow Linux games asking for ports.

Using Proton will always be being second class citizen.
Proton will always have to chase whatever Windows comes up with.
Proton can at most be on par, but never ahead.

If that's what floats your boat, ok.

But how about letting others have it their way?

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Probably a good time to do Steam Cryptocoin/Bitcoin supported payments.

You cannot use "money" that might have double - or half - the value next week for serious business.

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Yeah, but what other payment networks are out there? Visa and Master Card basically control the market, with Amex not far behind... PayPal, Stripe and most similar services? They still rely on the other payment networks "behind the scenes".

What about ye good olde bank-to-bank money transfer?
I order my bank to give some bucks to Valve's bank. If my bank would choose to censor stuff, I can choose to use another bank.

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I read their post in search, but I didn't find the part "Nvidia products will not contain such backdoors."

To me, this is sounding close to "We don't want to, trustworthy systems never will be built this way - but we have to."

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There you have it:

/snap/steam/current/lib/i386-linux-gnu
/snap/steam/current/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu
/snap/mesa-2404/current/usr/lib/i386-linux-gnu

Both the steam and mesa snap contain the needed 32bit libraries.

So, where is the advantage? The native package pulls in the libraries - and so does the Snap package... Of course. They're needed. You don't really see the count of packages containing the libs as a disadvantage, do you?

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Steam snap relies on gaming-graphics-core22 (which snaps kisak-fresh) and gtk-common-themes (the latter one is shared among several snaps).

So, where do the 32 bit libs come from that are needed to run the Steam client - let alone those that are needed to run 32 bit games?

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And it doesn't explain, why this is in any way "preferred"

I know of two reasons: Valve recommends other ways, and when you're doing support on the Steam forums, problems due to Snap and Flatpak keep popping up.

Of course, if you know what you're doing and can help yourself, use whatever floats your boat.

Really? All of a sudden 169 packages are something that goes without saying while at the same time snap packages are the source of all evil because they are oh so resource hungry.
And no: My rig has plenty of mass storage - still I'm in no need for 169 packages. And I can still remember it once got me into dependency hell when an i386 package was apparently out of sync with its AMD64 sibling...

I would be very surprised if there's no similar amount of libs provided by some Snap package your Steam package is depending upon.

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