Eventually == over a decade ago, at least on windows.
From a technical perspective, steam was originally basically just a chroot-style environment that let you have an independent set of DLLs installed for each windows game on your machine.
Before that, I averaged four hours of fucking around with directx diagnostic bullshit whenever I bought a new AAA title for windows (and getting the new game to work usually broke some old games)
These days, Steam’s Linux support for Windows games is better than native Windows support ever was.
Currently, they require a fairly small base set of 32 bit Linux libraries with a relatively stable ABI. That lets them abstract away all the other crap on your Linux desktop.
Agreed, I've gone through the same when I was on windows and switched back to Linux about three years ago. Windows games that I run, leading and AAA titles in some cases, runs better on Steam Proton.
From a technical perspective, steam was originally basically just a chroot-style environment that let you have an independent set of DLLs installed for each windows game on your machine.
Before that, I averaged four hours of fucking around with directx diagnostic bullshit whenever I bought a new AAA title for windows (and getting the new game to work usually broke some old games)
These days, Steam’s Linux support for Windows games is better than native Windows support ever was.
Currently, they require a fairly small base set of 32 bit Linux libraries with a relatively stable ABI. That lets them abstract away all the other crap on your Linux desktop.