No, you basically cannot use Proton on Mac to anywhere near the degree it currently supports games on Linux.

Long story short, they differ a lot.

Think of like... a bear, dog, and cat all have a single common ancestor if you go back far enough.

... But they are significantly different from each other in a wide variety of ways.

It seems that there are some semi-comparable ways to do more gaming on a Mac.

1. Dual Boot Asahi Linux, then use Proton from Asahi, running Windows games via Proton on Linux, on Mac hardware.

https://blog.greggant.com/posts/2025/02/07/proton-asahi-linux-mac-gaming-tutorial.html

Seems to technically work, but basically to me it sounds like where Proton on non-Mac baremetal Linux was around 4-5 years ago, ie, theres a lot of work to be done, but, some things work reasonably well.

2. Port the game to Mac yourself with the Mac game porting toolkit.

https://developer.apple.com/games/game-porting-toolkit/

Somewhat hilariously to me, many Mac/Tech media sites have described this as 'Basically Proton for Mac', which uh, no, its not, not even close.

Proton takes Windows hooks and calls and translates them in realtime to execute in realtime on a Linux system. Only non instant thing is building up a shader cache, but I'm pretty sure you do that on Windows too.

This... is porting a game.

Granted, it is impressive that any kind of automated tool/system like this even exists at all, but uh, this is more like a guided recompiling of the entire game binary to something that will run natively on a Mac.

So that is... not any kind of a realtime translation layer.

As best I can tell, results for how well it actually works are roughly:

Most of the time it does produce a valid, working game binary, but performance is often terrible for more graphically complex games.

I guess if any Mac users have more info or corrections to this, I'm all ears.

I know much more about linux and windows than Mac, so I may be missing something or innacurate.

Afaik MacOS doesn't support Vulcan, since Apple pushes their own Metal instead. So there's the problem of translating one to another, and idk how well it works. (To my vague knowledge Proton doesn't work on Mac, only vanilla Wine does.)

Older games work through Wine, however.