It's what most entrepreneurs do: They take credit for a lot of other people's work.

The whole riding on the shoulder of giants and all that... not for entrepreneurs. They are self-made... a mini-universe within the universe.

Overall, I think it's a rather nice platform! The forums and other community features like hubs and profile customization are pretty cool and seem to be formatted well enough, and the selection of games is obviously very nice. It is unfortunate that the sales aren't what they used to be; For a while now being pretty straightforward with no events or minigames ever running, but it is what it is.

I do wish that there was more curation when it comes to the selection of titles sold however, a lot of low effort stuff is frequently released there, but again - it is what it is. There are benefits to having it be easier to getting your game on Steam, even though I sometimes wish they had stuck to the Greenlight system they had a while ago.

I usually don’t care, but here it has a direct negative effect on some of my activities: the Wine Application Database is almost dead, it seems that now people only send compatibility reports to the Proton database instead.

The functionality had been there for ages (at least 10 years). It's just pretty much a new UI and controller friendly enviroment developed for the Steam Deck.
What's most baffling to me is that most Linux gaming circles don't even know what is GOG.com. People only Use Steam and some adventurers do also use Epic.

"blah blah blah, windows is bad because Linux is good and playing all my games on Linux is da best eva and Denuvo is da worst and only DRM eva" -> proceeds to only use the 2 places known to humanity to download pc games, Steam and HighSeasBay

Kinda explains why Steam was introducing Proton, so they can "grab" the Linux community, as even those are now mostly on Steam.

There is not only Denuvo... Arxan is on the rise. Perhaps someone should put an DRM on a Linux OS and offer it on Steam, it would be a high success. Free OS for all, from Steam. Okay... there is already the Linux-based Steam-OS, and it kinda is already DRMed as it is linked to Steam and those needs.

I mean, Linux users keep telling me, they can get to run any game ever. But if they have to rely on Proton to make it happen... it does not sound tasty to me, as Linux will not be free.

Is that right? Guess it needed the new UI to become more visible to some

Well, you can typically push Proton aside as the code improvements it brings are typically backported into Wine. Think of it as the sort of symbiosis that Fedora and Red Hat share.

A lot of games, yes. I’m a Linux gamer and I’ve found that not every game works on Linux. But almost everything I play, works. Even non-Steam games like Blizz games seem to work on Linux with a little bit of tinkering, thanks to Proton.

Proton isn’t perfect. But Linux gaming is night and day compared to 10 years ago. And we have Valve to thank for that.

Proton is nothing but a fancy name for a couple of open source tools (as far as I know), like Wine, DXVK, D3DVK etc.
If memory isn't failing too much, developer of DXVK (DX to Vulkan translation layer) got hired by Valve but still release the code.

You can pretty much apply the translation layer yourself or use automated tools like Lutris, Bottles or PlayonLinux without ever touching Steam.
However, adding a non-Steam game to Steam library and apply the Proton translation layer works fine as well.
The old UI was very cumbersome and outdated, glad they changed it. It makes adding non-Steam games on the Steam Deck a breeze instead of a chore.

They didn't. They develop PROTON, which is based on WINE. They've always given credit to the WINE project.

If they really gave proper credit, Linux gamers would thank CodeWeavers and the many WINE contributors for the ability to play Windows games on Linux.

But no, when reading places like this forum, reddit or actually any Linux gaming forum, all thanks go exclusively to Valve. It seems that most of them do not even know that WINE has been a thing for almost as long as Linux itself.

Or, people just don't look into it because they're lazy and pick the lowest hanging fruit.

I really like this nifty feature steam has, that GOG really should try to implement.

It is called:
Being able to download the games you buy on the platform.

Then you;re not removing anything. It's just "hide" again under a different name.