I was just wondering what would happen if I downloaded a game that was infected by a computer virus and ran it in Linux using Proton.
Has this happened to anyone? How would the virus behave? What files, connections or devices would it have access to? Could it be as damaging as running in in Windows?
Proton/wine makes no security assurances, so it will be able to do anything that any other program you run is able to do. If a trojan or rat recognizes that it is running under wine, it can bring in some native Linux malware as well and it will execute just fine. https://forum.winehq.org/viewtopic.php?t=34573