That'd make it even stranger, like wouldn't that reliably always fix the issue, since that's the actual dependency? It looks a bit like it's not entirely completely somehow though.

What about the WMP versions in winetricks? Are they incomplete?

Oh yeah Proton-GE is definitely my go-to usually, has fixed some stuff before, but there are still cases where it doesn't help. Idk what it does under the hood though.

Interesting, I take it you don't remember the source? I might want to look into that.

Kinda weird, typically there's always a... less than legal solution for problems like that, y'know?

Most recent example I can think of is the Mega Man ZX games in the Mega Man Zero/ZX Legacy Collection, which are PC ports of old NDS games. The cutscenes just show a white screen. Did manage to fix that thanks to someone's help on reddit (was related to mfplat and another component iirc), but there are also instances where that won't work (I tried to help someone fix a cutscene issue on an obscure visual novel, but I couldn't get that to work if my life depended on it).

Modern games do seem fairly safe though, like you said.

Isn't that more of a legal thing than a technical one?

Fedora, although I dislike SELinux and I think they should have a less strict policy with regards to FLOSS. Like, I prefer FLOSS over proprietary software, but I just wish they'd be a bit more pragmatic and allow both on the default repos and just leave it up to the user to decide what to use and what not. I guess that would also prevent dilemmas like the recent hardware acceleration drama?

Otherwise I like their balance between stability and being up to date, fast update cycle and the large amount of available packages.

What's good about AppImages? Imo they're the worst packaging format; you can't install and upgrade them from the command line like with native packages or Flatpaks, there's not a repository-like centralized place for them, they get messy quickly since there's not really an "official" default installation path so it's up to you to keep them organized, they don't integrate with system themes very well and you need a separate program (AppImage Launcher) to even get them to show up as an installed program or even pin them to your taskbar.