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).
Windows redistributables are installed in each game’s Proton (Wine) prefix directory, not globally. However, I have seen an example of Proton continually forgetting that it had already installed .Net for a certain game, which turned out to be due to a registry entry not getting set during install. If you’ve found a situation like this, it’s probably worth reporting on the Proton issue for that game.
I don’t know what issues you encountered, but if you’re interested in the Flatpak, it might be worth trying those games again, possibly with Steam Linux Runtime manually set in the game’s compatibility options. Recent runtime versions have changed how they provide libraries to native linux games.