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I remember when Proton launched it was like magic playing games like Doom and Nier Automata straight from the Linux Steam client with excellent performance. I do not miss the days of having the Windows version of Steam installed separately.
Warcraft 3 worked better then on win. At that time more then half of games worked (newest aaa-est usually had problems). Just before proton almost all games worked (with some winetricks black magic). Valve did help, but there's more to the story.
I had the opposite experience. WarCraft III would frequently soft lock my PC forcing a reboot, plus you couldn't use the mouse to move the camera because the game couldn't detect the mouse going to the screen edge, forcing you to use the arrow keys.
Some versions of Wine also wouldn't allow you to connect to Bnet, requiring a rollback to a previous version from months prior.
I put -opengl on the end of it and it worked great. Wasn't on release, but later when dota was popular.
Of course I would've forced OpenGL. DXVK didn't exist at the time and DirectX 8 or 9 games were unplayably laggy back in 2007. Apparently you could run DirectX apps with near-native performance by sourcing the necessary Windows DLL's but that would involve piracy?