Like as in beer? No. Or free as in freedom? Also no.
However, iCloud will give you a large amount of the feature set for a fraction of the price (starts at $0.99/mo) and will likely give privacy not too far from what Proton gives you.
In the end, there’s always a risk with putting any information on the web.
I absolutely agree with you, but look at launchers and such. Steam is very much proprietary and commercial. I find it a little odd that those who might do anything to avoid proprietary software, willingly use it for gaming.
Is it just me or has using a brand name as a regular noun become really common? For example, Android-based devices are just referred to as “an Android”.
Funnily enough, I’ve got a pretty well-loved ThinkPad T480 16 GB 8350U sitting right here. Used to be my main development laptop. Now it’s just an agent for Portainer.
There’s nothing wrong with the software itself. It works great for what it does. On the other hand, it’s a compatibility layer, which always increases friction between things a little. I think the best use for this is running legacy software.
There aren’t many alternatives. Maybe in the future, we’ll see graphics API abstraction libraries like wgpu get used more. This gives developers a single API which can use DirectX on Windows, Vulkan on Linux, or Metal on macOS. This could allow support for entirely new graphics APIs without developers using it having to do anything.
Of course, that’s my opinion. People can build their software how they like.