>>1510343Proton is a custom fork of Wine bundled with Steam, and yes, it is generally intended for running Steam games, which means having Steam open in the background while you play them.
>Isn't that going to take a hit to my performance.Not unless you're using the Flatpak version of Steam.
>And why use proton then if I can just run it normally through wine?If your (I assume non-Steam) games run fine in Wine, then there is no point in using Proton with them.
If you're using Wine to run Steam to run Windows Steam games, don't. Use the Linux version of Steam and run those games with Proton instead.
In any case, what distro are you running?