Games run faster on SteamOS than Windows 11, Ars testing finds

Might be unfair to call Proton a "translation layer" because the Win32 API is not defined in terms of system calls but rather a set of functions exported from a DLL.

Proton supplies a DLL that implements the Win32 API using Linux syscalls. Windows supplies a DLL that implements that Win32 API using Windows syscalls that you're not really supposed to use directly.

https://www.winehq.org/ calls it a compatibility layer that translates calls on the fly.

so 'translation layer' is not that unfair.

Clearly they don't want to come out and say that Wine is an "implementation of windows apis", because that would invite legal issues. But clearly this is what Wine really is for a large part. Some stuff are just shallow shims to Linux apis, while other stuff they need to make more of their own implementation of.