I used to compulsively rip chunks out of my fingers using my teeth as a form of anxiety driven self harm. I'd say it's close to pork, but I haven't tasted raw pork

Gamescope is a microcompositor from Valve that is used on the Steam Deck. Its goal is to provide an isolated compositor that is tailored towards gaming and supports many gaming-centric features such as:

-Spoofing resolutions -turning off VSync on Wayland desktops -using HDR -Upscaling using AMD FidelityFX™ Super Resolution or NVIDIA Image Scaling -Limiting framerates

In particular, gamescope is rendered seperately to your entire desktop, meaning that certain problem games that may have issues when rendered by your normal compositor (wayland or X11) may work fine under gamescope. For instance: certain games may have jerky mouse input or frequent crashes when running under wayland, but those issue may disappear when running within gamescope.

(this is also why we call gamescope a micro-compositor, as it runs seperately to your main compositor that handles your desktop e.g. Wayland or X11)

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Gamescope

Heroic launcher installs Wine-GE by default, so you don't need protonup-qt

when will I actually be able to use a native wayland version of wine?

it's certainly more streamlined. I think 'better' is a more reletive term here. Certainly for non-problem games that will simply work under proton GE, it's better.

how do I do that?

Yes!

honestly arch has treated me well, its just that I'm having a certified arch moment trying to get a VPN working and thought about how much easier it is on other distros that dont throw you to the terminal dogs

I used to have Nord, it seems a little pricey to me?