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?
Use the comments on protondb. They often list tweeks and troubleshooting steps that have been taken. Check steam community posts for specific games. You can also make your own post if nobody else has had your issue. General searches will usually get you where you need to go. I use kagi but generally anything not google works.
The problem with the comments is that they are often specific to one GPU vendor and if you have optimus or not. So it takes time to look which ones apply and try them out