WillBalls

Proton is certainly “cleaner” to use with Steam, but you don’t have to use Steam to use proton. I’d recommend adding the executable to Steam as a non-Steam game for simplicity. Otherwise you can use Lutris or find a tutorial online to run that specific executable with proton outside of Steam

Both of those games are marked gold on protonDB, so you shouldn’t have to use windows to run them if you want (although marvel rivals apparently needs SteamDeck=1 %command% in the launch options): https://www.protondb.com/app/3107230 https://www.protondb.com/app/2767030

There’s dozens of us!

I’ve had to do very little tweaking overall to get most games working, with the one notable exception being dragons dogma 2. The solution was proton GE and a new .nix file with GPU tweaks and now I’m getting slightly better performance than the average windows experience.