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?
Well, there’s this study from 2018: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11416-018-0319-9
Given that Priton / Wine / … try to simulate a Windows environment, it’s certainly possible. But I’ve never heard this happened to anyone. And the discussions on the internet seem very theoretical.
Surely it highly depends on the exact kind of malware and what it tries to do. And it doesn’t really seem to happen in the wild. But I see no reason why it wouldn’t theoretically work.