I have been on Linux for over 15 years and even I don't want to go back to the old days of manually installing Wine and having to create different prefixes to get different games to launch without sound. or some missing textures.

100% this. I've been on Linux for 27 years now (ffs I'm getting old), and until proton, I just wrote off gaming as a hit or miss experience, usually not worth the trouble. Now I'll buy Windows only games without even checking compatibility in most cases. Unless it's a full price AAA game, I'll risk the off chance that it doesn't work.

Gaming on Mac was also more or less the same when it came to running windows games, had to use wine

And I'm sorry y'all I know wine is awesome but using it manually is a pain in the ass and I hated it and I consider myself more of an enthusiast

Honestly, 5 years ago Proton was already in pretty good shape. 2018 is when I switched to Linux, and already had very little trouble gaming.

I think it's less Proton, more Vulkan/DXVK. Proton is just wrapping these amazing things. Before DXVK, games in Linux used to suck big time.

If we can get close to that kind of support for productivity software, I think Linux usage would explode. One of the problems with business adoption is that specialized software almost always skips Linux. The Affinity suite, for example. I’m hoping we see some snowballing now that Linux is growing so quickly, but getting Wine/Proton working with more non-game software would also be an enormous win.

now is a good time to switch. Im so glad im off windows and their bullshit. a lot of games just work, including many online games, which is super cool. often there's no difference between launching a game on Linux vs windows.

Absolutely. Linux in general has become very approachable. I recently came back to Linux after 15 years away and I have been very impressed with how well everything just works. I've only experienced very minor issues with peripherals that were solved with a simple Google search or update.