First of all, I don’t want you to help me with a specific problem. All the details in this post are just examples and I’m interested in getting a general understanding.
So I just wanted to play doom eternal, but when I press play on steam, after a couple of seconds the button switches from blue back to green with no game running. I checked protondb and saw that the game was gold rated, so it should run fine.
I checked the tweaks that people use and they suggest different proton versions. But no matter what I do, I basically get nothing. There are no error messages or log files. Same with other games I tried in the past.
So basically when a game does not work out of the box, I have no idea where to look for cues on how to fix it. Is there a verbose mode or something similar?
Troubleshooting software is a deep rabbit hole. Troubleshooting modern games, made for a complex operating system like Windows and running on another operating system, is a very deep rabbit hole.
However, since you’re just launching games through Steam, you probably won’t have to go very deep. This would be a pretty good place to start:
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton?tab=readme-ov-file#readme
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki
Note especially the FAQ