I don’t know the business negotiations of all that. But if you watch the video, Phawx basically uses one single command to lower the wattage on his Windows handheld and instantly triple the expected battery life. The underlying OS clearly supports it. Seems to me like the AMD driver just isn’t detecting that the game has light power needs and so isn’t throttling like it should.
This quick video from The Phawx seems to show that the battery performance difference isn’t actually inherent to Windows, but rather that the GPU drivers don’t throttle down the TDP when they should.
Windows has plenty of other issues but it seems any frustration about this specifically should be pointed at AMD.
I’m far from an expert but I believe Proton is specifically intended to provide compatability with Windows gaming tech like DirectX.
For regular non-game software you don’t need that tech, you can just run it through Wine itself (Proton is built on Wine). Bottles is actually what I see recommended these days (it simplifies management of Wine prefixes) and supposedly many apps can run in a few clicks.
Ok, glad to be wrong there and more than happy to blame Windows then. I ditched it completely a couple years ago and I’ve been enjoying Linux gaming ever since.