Uh, no. Not the majority. Not by a long shot.

What problems do you anticipate? Wine, which Proton is just a modified version of, implements file dialogs. If it didn’t, just about every application that isn’t a game would be broken. Needing to open files is pretty ubiquitous, after all. You need file dialogs for that.

It isn’t significant. Wine already supports the vast majority of MediaFoundation codecs with GStreamer. This is just an alternative backend that uses FFmpeg instead of GStreamer. GStreamer already has an FFmpeg plugin, so this doesn’t add any new codecs to the table. It seems there’s just a long term plan to move away from GStreamer for whatever reason.

Wine’s MF support used to be much worse, which is why Valve had to do their workaround shader hack. Not sure what exactly the current status on that is, but I do know things like mf-install or Proton-GE are rarely if ever necessary anymore, even with non-Steam games (which I have plenty of).

Well, Steam and Proton both already run on top of FEX or Box64 on ARM Linux, but it’s nice to see an official effort from Valve.

Also, does ARM still have better battery life when all of the machine code has to be translated from x86? That adds a not insubstantial amount of CPU overhead, which does hurt battery life.

And perhaps most importantly, is there any ARM chipset out there that can deliver performance on par with the Steam Deck’s CPU (even after factoring in the overhead of the x86 JIT) at a viable price for a Steam Deck successor?

I’m surprised you could even run a Linux distro with X11 and KDE1 on 8MB of RAM.

Qt1 came with two default themes. One of them mimicked Win95 and the other mimicked Motif. KDE1 defaulted to the former in order to look more familiar. To this day, the “Windows 9x” theme still ships with Qt and can be selected on any Plasma 6 install. Starting with KDE2 they started using their own custom themes for everything, tho.

GNOME 1 actually looked very similar, which isn’t surprising because its main goal at that point was to offer a replacement for KDE that didn’t depend on then-proprietary Qt. GNOME 2 and KDE 2 is when they really started building a distinct identity.