You cannot use Valve's Proton builds without Steam without a high chance of issues since there are some hacks included that depend on a running Steam instance.
It's not hard to build a version that does not depend on Steam. And you don't have to since there is a version pre-built for Lutris. You can find it here at
https://github.com/GloriousEggroll/wine-ge-custom if you want to use it without Lutris.
Most of the times I use the default Arch Linux wine build, but I've had sound troubles (no speech/music) in Fallout 4, so I use that build which includes most of the patches that Proton uses. Without Proton development I probably wouldn't be able to play the GOG version with working sound.
The actual proton script just sets up Wine prefixes automatically – the only real difference is that it uses symlinks instead of copies to reduce the size. And then it handles the whole environment variables that need to be set to use a local wine version, i.e. WINEDIR, WINEDIR, WINEDLLPATH and PATH.
vv221: - Start pushing your fork, Proton;
It is not a fork. Proton is not a modified version of wine. Proton is a python script and a bundle of different things including a custom wine build and dxvk. The whole thing is on github and makes heavy use of git submodules.
vv221: - Ensure that resources focus on your fork, not the original (see how ProtonDB killed WineHQ AppDB?);
That's the users fault. ProtonDB is not run by Valve, it is something someone else started. And to be fair, Wine HQ AppDB has always been very inconsistent in its usefulness. On top of that I would say that ProtonDB is a lot easier to use for non tech-savvy people.
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Valve is obviously acting for their own interests, but their focus on improving Linux gaming and desktop experience by throwing money at graphic drivers, display managers, wine, dxvk, vkd3d, etc. is very useful for anyone interested in Linux.
