I get all that, they’re all very good points. I had windows tuned to the best of my abilities, I try to use windows whenever possible at home because I manage windows servers professionally and it’s helpful to get as much hands on time with the platform as I can. But this was such a dramatic difference out of the box that I’m going to stick with it for now at least. I’m not willing to invest the time into tweaking windows to run this well (if I even can) and it’s a dedicated gaming rig so many of the “Linux on the desktop” complaints won’t apply to my use case.

Mostly I’m shocked that getting significantly improved performance when running through a compatibility layer was even possible. I expected proton to be almost as good as native. In this instance it ended up being a huge improvement.