I was looking for a pretty niche indie game, but I wanted to try it out before purchasing… The only link that still works is made by a user who made their account 4 years ago and about 700 posts, but also 1 warning.
How do I know whether or not I should trust this link?
Proton is not the same as a VM. It has direct access to your filesystem. It could delete your entire home directory if it wanted to.
Although, as a practical matter it provides some protection in the sense that most malware is probably not designed to do that and will, at worst, fuck up the Windows environment created by Wine / Proton. It’s not something to rely on but it is a bit safer than running something directly on your home machine as a practical matter.
(Although I guess that depends what the malware does. If it searches every document on your system for credit card numbers and sends them to Albania, that would probably still work.)