How do WINE and Proton work for running Windows applications/games on Linux?
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Both Windows and Linux runs on the exact same computer. So there is no need to emulate any hardware. So there is not theoretically any performance issues running Windows applications on Linux. Even the libraries used by the applications are mostly the same as there are usually both Windows and Linux code for most libraries.
There are however a few differences. The way the executable are loaded is slightly different. It is not only different file formats but there is a difference in how libraries are merged into the application. This is things that the core WINE project solves. In addition to this there are unique libraries to Windows which does not exist natively on Linux. For example all the interactions with the kernel is different, file systems behave differently, etc. So there are a lot of Windows libraries which have to be remade as a Linux variant. This is where a lot of the work in WINE have gone into.
In general games do not use much system libraries. However they rely heavily on the graphics API which is implemented by the graphic card drivers. It is easy for games which use open source APIs like OpenGL and Vulcan as these are implemented by the Linux graphics card drivers as well. However others like DirectX is proprietary for Windows. So a big challenge for running Windows games on Linux have been to implement the graphics drivers that are proprietary. There are some of these in WINE already but Proton have implemented even more of them and they offer better performance and compatibility.
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