>>106098886steam is malware, the sole reason for it to exist is literally just DRM and surveillance.
>protonyes proton is pretty good, but its just wine with a bunch of patches, and backed by valve
proton itself is free software (a license mutt consisting of LGPL-2.1+ BSD BSD-2 IJG MIT OPENLDAP ZLIB gsm libpng2 libtiff || ( WTFPL-2 public-domain )), but that's not gonna help you if your games are spying on you.
https://spyware.neocities.org/articles/steam
https://wiki.gentoo.org/wiki/Steam
plus, steam is poorly designed. its literally just electron (chromium) with additional malware to interact with their website, it somehow manages to require 32 bit libraries, but doesn't even run on 32 bit hardware at all, so enjoy being forever locked to x86_64 with multilib cancer.
i consider all proprietary software to be malware (malicious software), because the mere fact that it restricts my freedom, tells me what i can and can't do on my own computer, tries to hide something in the code, and refuses to even let me see what it does; is malicious as hell to me.