Kayx291: It is possible to run Proton without Steam at all for years but you'd be susceptible to various dependency problems which UMU makes it no longer being a problem.
Syphon72: So UMU is making it more streamline to use Proton without steam? Interesting, how much easier does it make installing GOG games? I might need to try it out now. Thank you for the information.
Currently Heroic Games Launcher has a built in UMU support as experimental which requires you to manually enable it from settings, Lutris also has it. You just install the game through em with selected Proton version on em and let UMU do its job.
Currently HGL is in partnership with GOG so each time you buy a GOG game through em they get some commission.
vv221: I can’t say anything about VKD3D-Proton, but for the lack of inclusion of DXVK, it is on the DXVK devs. They purposefully choose to develop it in a way that makes it impossible to include in upstream WINE (the lack of inclusion was not their goal, obviously, but they knew from the start that their choices would lead to this inability to include it upstream).
VKD3D-Proton is literally based on Wine's VKD3D, albeit more gaming oriented. As for DXVK it started off as a single project to get NiER Automata playable until it received some big attention and the real reason why it won't be included into Wine is because its written primarily in C++, not C as Wine team wanted it which is their loss.
Although i guess they also do not want to incorporate VKD3D-Proton as well which from what i've heard runs way better than Wine's own project.