Wine is the base for Proton, which lets windows games run on the Deck.

The interesting bit here is the change to how DLLs are loaded. Currently with Wine and Proton, you do at times need to do a bit of a workaround for games that need specific DLLs for their mods. With this change now in place and shipped in Wine, it means that if the DLL company name attached is not Microsoft (so a custom one supplied with the mod or game), Wine will automatically use it over the Wine version.

Hopefully, the end result will be a number of mods for Windows games on Linux / SteamOS will be easier to run, often out of the box with no extra changes or launch options. And, eventually, Valve will pull the changes into Proton so everyone using it with Steam will see the benefits of it.