> (Dead Cells, for example. The native port crashes the Steam overlay and lacks Steam Controller support, but running the Windows version in Proton is seamless)
Suggests the comment is about running the Windows version under Proton being a better experience than running the native Linux version.
Both are correct. Some native ports run better under Proton because the port sucks, but I recently saw a video where they compared Doom Eternal with Proton vs running native on Windows, and the Proton version ran better than the Windows version running natively.
It would be interesting to have some analysis digging into potential causes for this result. As someone who was recently surprised at how much impact a CPU upgrade (G3258 -> 4570 on the same LGA 1150 motherboard [1]) had on overall performance even in older indie titles where I wouldn't have expected it to matter much, I would be curious to look at what background services are running, what their cpu/memory footprint is, and how well the OS handles scheduling them.
Even without the obvious pigs like virus scanner, printer utility, launchers for other storefronts, various chrome-embeds like Slack and Spotify, I wouldn't be surprised if the Linux desktop does a better job of this.
The most common theory is that it's the Denuvo anti-piracy software. It's known to cause performance drops on Windows, and it often has to be bypassed or disabled in Linux games.
> (Dead Cells, for example. The native port crashes the Steam overlay and lacks Steam Controller support, but running the Windows version in Proton is seamless)
Suggests the comment is about running the Windows version under Proton being a better experience than running the native Linux version.