While I respect the degree of technical expertise you can get on SO, I am very much convinced this is a failed experiment which will slowly collapse on itself. And I think that because the organization of the site is completely at odds with it’s professed goal.
SO is not really a forum, because time is supposed to be irrelevant : a 12 years old answer takes precedence over a question asked now, failing to consider that, maybe, the context of this question has changed. Its ridiculous, especially in the context of software engineering.
On the other hand, it’s not a library either : a library is a collection of book, which are relatively self-contained knowledge systems. And in practice, the SO answers are not self-contained. They merely answer a specific point, with no guaranteed coherence from one to another, so a beginner cannot use them to build a broad understanding of a subject.
To take the analogy of the Cathedral and the Bazar, I am under the impression that SO members are trying to build a cathedral out of the stone sold by hundred of bazaar people, and refuse to see that fact that all stones all having different sizes and dimensions is maybe kind of a problem when you build a cathedral.
If the game is reasonably well-coded, there’s not going to be any obvious difference between a game running on Windows, a game running native on Linux, and a game running using Proton.
I mean yeah, you could have some performance impact (usually light, occasionaly not so), maybe video not playing (some games use video formats for cutscenes which can’t be distributed on Linux installs), or maybe issues with windowing (Tropico 6 has an weird bug where the game mouse pointer has a bit of offset compared to the real one, until you change screen size).
But in most cases, if it works, it works the same.