Comment by tombert
Interesting; I haven't played BeamNG but it looks like it should work according to the ProtonDB https://www.protondb.com/app/284160. Sample size of one, but I haven't really had any issues with Proton on Linux, particularly within the "SteamOS" tenfoot interface. I don't play online games, and admittedly most of my games are several years old, so I can't tell you how well modern games play (though a friend of mine didn't appear to have too much trouble getting Pacific Drive working on full blast).
Not trying to diminish your struggle, and if it didn't work for you then obviously you shouldn't use it.
I don't own a Gamecube controller anymore, but I haven't noticed much lag with a wireless Switch Pro controller with Dolphin. I played through Tony Hawk's Underground and Tony Hawk's American wasteland on my laptop a few months ago using Dolphin, and as far as I could tell my terrible scores had nothing to do with lag, and I was able to finish them.
Definitely have had issues with Nvidia drivers though. It cost me an entire weekend getting one working a few months ago and I didn't enjoy that process.
Yeah this is why I don't trust the ProtonDB ratings. It says gold, but everyone else has the same problem as me where it's slower and crashes if you spawn traffic. Also had to wait like 30 minutes to generate vulkan shaders. AoE2:DE's ProtonDB page says gold but there are a bunch of comments saying multiplayer doesn't work at all... I feel like that's not gold either.
The GC thing is specifically the Wii U adaptor. There's an overclock kmod, but it's known (on gh issues) to be finicky and didn't work for me. Regular controllers have no lag but also don't work quite the same; on Win and Mac the standard is that Wii U adaptor.