Would love a new Steam Machine and could actually be good this time. Proton didn’t exist when they released the original Steam Machines which limited you to linux ports of games. I had bought two but wiped & did clean installs of Windows 7 so we could play all the games wanted to.
Before Proton, gaming on linux relied on native ports or WINE. Native ports were rare & not always better. WINE took some learning to make work well but I dunno, never got any good at it.