this post was submitted on 25 May 2025
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Steam Deck
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The big thing though about Proton is that it's not an additional translation/emulation layer. It doesn't translate into Spanish for Linux, as that would be slow, it makes Linux talk English.
So in your example, imagine you, the English speaking program, want to catch a taxi in Madrid/Linux but all taxi drivers speak only Spanish. An emulation layer would be "translating", so you would have an additional guy in the taxi that you could talk to that talks to the Spanish driver. Proton is not that, it's an English-speaking taxi driver.
Proton uses Wine, which is a Windows system call API translation layer for Linux. In other words, it translates commands for the Windows kernel into calls for the Linux kernel.
So it's kind of an emulator and kind of not, but regardless the metaphor of a translator is fine. As a lightweight translator, you might say it's like using Google Translate on your phone to translate back and forth quickly and automatically, rather than having a person in the middle who needs to think about it.
In Software Design terminology, Wine and DXVK are "adaptor" layers (each convert one kind of API interface into a different kind - Wine doing Windows API to Linux API conversion and DXVK doing DirectX API to Vulkan API - and nothing more) whilst Proton is more a controller that just manages those things and adds some more functionality on top such as Steam integration for ease of use.
Without Proton users would have to know a bunch of command lines parameters and environment setup to launch all the right components with the right configuration so that they can first install and then run their Windows game in Linux. In fact this is the situation if you use Wine directly without something like Lutris to do a similar work as Proton.
Personally I prefer Lutris since it's more flexible - for example I can configure it to run games sandboxed with networking disabled - and it's not tightly bound to a single games store.
I used to use Lutris, but I found Heroic more consistent and convenient for filling the same purpose. It's quite good at downloading just the diff needed for GoG game updates these days, for instance, which is key for big games like Baldur's Gate 3.
I'd say it's something like a babelfish. You speak English, I hear Spanish.
I think the example you're using is closer to emulation.
I'm not an expert by any means, most of my technology experience comes from hardware. But Proton isn't changing the Linux ecosystem, and the programs are still expecting a windows environment when they're run via Proton.
From what I recall, Linux and windows can both do the same stuff, they just have different names or different ways to ask for resources. And Proton receives the request for whatever and converts it to the Linux equivalent.
It's not nearly as bad as it was in the past, now that the graphics APIs are system agnostic.
Well, technically speaking, neither would be emulation because both systems are running on x86.