Though the poor argumentation began when you dismissed steve_v as a steam fanboy

well the fact is he started getting definitive after hearing something bad about steam
so my point stands hes a steam fanboy

"I.1.a.a1325–An assertion or fact put forward in order to persuade or sway others; a reason advanced in support of (or in opposition to) a proposition; the assertion or point of view for which a person is arguing."

Though the poor argumentation began when you dismissed steve_v as a steam fanboy.

after a casual review of all posts at:

https://dev1galaxy.org/search.php?actio … er_id=7554

...smells ...fishy ...ai/bot ...?

naw im no bot
quite a poor argument

https://dev1galaxy.org/search.php?action=show_user_posts&user_id=7554

...smells ...fishy ...ai/bot ...?

Is literally retrocomputing at this point (for the love of doG, at least put a C2Q in it), and you'd be better off dual-booting a stripped-down Windows XP. With those specs, WINE is "bloat".

linux works well on old pcs no need to use windows

last u checked you cant bow oxygen on a text bar
my point still stands you just a blunt fanboy of steam
and will go out of youre way and defend it

there is no reason to install storefront over wine
just to run exes
thats just bloat simple as

a core2duo and 4gigs of ram

Is literally retrocomputing at this point (for the love of doG, at least put a C2Q in it), and you'd be better off dual-booting a stripped-down Windows XP. With those specs, WINE is "bloat".

Nothing of the sort, simply saying it the way it is. If your graphics drivers advertise that they can do vulkan (which mesa can, on the CPU), then things will naturally try to use it.
None of this is steam at fault, it's simply a consequence of trying to run modern software on ancient hardware. Crying "bloat" any time you run into hardware limitations doesn't change reality.

Steam uses wine to run windows games. The differences between "vanilla" wine and steam's "proton" fork are minimal, and usually confined to the latter being optimised and/or patched for gaming as opposed to general application compatibility.

    steam defaults to vulkan so if youre card cant do vulkan it will run the game with software vulkan

This has nothing whatsoever to do with steam. Proton (and most other "gaming" focused wine builds and frontends for that matter) defaults to enabling DXVK (and VKD3D for DX12) , because that is by far the best performing DirectX API translation layer available.
DXVK will use whatever vulkan renderer the host graphics drivers advertise, and on antique GPUs that could well be the lavapipe CPU implementation... Provided by mesa.

If your GPU doesn't support vulkan, you'd be better served by reading the documentation and setting the appropriate environment variables, rather than wasting perfectly good oxygen bitching about steam and "bloat"

useing a core2duo and 4gigs of ram steam is very much bloat
no need to fanboy over a storefront

This has nothing whatsoever to do with steam. Proton (and most other "gaming" focused wine builds and frontends for that matter) defaults to enabling DXVK (and VKD3D for DX12) , because that is by far the best performing DirectX API translation layer available.
DXVK will use whatever vulkan renderer the host graphics drivers advertise, and on antique GPUs that could well be the lavapipe CPU implementation... Provided by mesa.

If your GPU doesn't support vulkan, you'd be better served by reading the documentation and setting the appropriate environment variables, rather than wasting perfectly good oxygen bitching about steam and "bloat".