i recognize that my individual use case here is not common. however i believe that it applies to many other use cases in some ways, and i also IMAGINE there are some workarounds that can make this work that i havent yet employed. i would like to see an easy way to treat the steam compatibility layer like bottles or a specific wine prefix. what im doing is installing music software using steam and finding that it runs smoother and is easier to setup than using wine or bottles (still wine)... but installing a plugin (vsti) that can be seen by a daw (program that runs the plugin)... is hit and miss. the proposal is simply to allow a compatibility layer which is a shared environment for multiple programs. in the general case this probably isn't desirable, but there would be some cases (games with shared libraries maybe) where this could be useful. but the fact that music software seems to run on steam without having to worry about fonts and without nearly as much latency would likely make linux users interested in installing reaper/ableton/flstudios and a variety of VSTi's through steam if there was an easy method, i've tried having it change install path and the results never seem to work and it installs to odd places, some files go in one place some files go another. but if this was all able to be added to one environment i think it would work just fine. thanks for the consideration and if theres already a user friendly way to do this let me know ;) thanks in advance :)