Use Proton for Windows games on Steam. Use Bottles for everything else: Office, Adobe apps, business tools, non-Steam games. Both run on Wine, which maps Windows API calls to Linux without a virtual machine. DXVK and VKD3D-Proton handle the DirectX side. Wine 11.0 closes most of the remaining gap to native Windows.

This guide covers the full stack in 2026: what each piece does, how to set up Proton and Bottles, how to tune DirectX translation, and what still breaks.