So this has been annoying for a while but got REALLY bothersome while I was debugging Armored Core 6 crashing on the first real boss fight (the answer is Proton 7.06, by the way).

It seems like it is a crapshoot as to whether steam borks itself while installing directx or any other redistributables. Resulting in some games working and others just hanging. And if it breaks, I need to clear the download cache and try again. And every time there is a new proton version it triggers a rebuild and now a different set of games work and don’t work.

From brief experimentation, it looks like not letting steam compile shaders in the background helps with this. But… I would rather restart steam every other day than wait 40 minutes to play Warframe.

So are there any tips to prevent Steam from being like a kitten tangled up in a ball of yarn? Ubuntu 22.04 with Steam installed via apt install steam if it makes a significant difference. I know people are really big on flatpaks right now but avoided that due to issues with like the two native linux games that still exist in Steam (mostly joking).