Game does not launch on Ubuntu

[spaghet]

Hey all, I'm having trouble launching the game on Ubuntu. It literally just does nothing. I'm on Proton Experimental. Anyone know what's going on? It's rated Platinum on Proton DB. I have the latest Nvidia driver.

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 570.144                Driver Version: 570.144        CUDA Version: 12.8     |
|-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name                 Persistence-M | Bus-Id          Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp   Perf          Pwr:Usage/Cap |           Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                                         |                        |               MIG M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
|   0  NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090        Off |   00000000:01:00.0  On |                  Off |
|  0%   37C    P5             22W /  450W |     910MiB /  24564MiB |     10%      Default |
|                                         |                        |                  N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
                                                                                         

[Ratsplat]

So for me, my issue was that whenever I tried to run it a little pop up would say that I need to load some C++ thing or something or another. You may be missing some Windows files. Initially I ignored this since proton was supposed to just work.

Linux Mint.

[spaghet]

Okay, so I got it running. Here's what happened.

Something was failing when launching the game. I read online that PROTON_LOG=1 helps. But I wasn't getting any logs. So I tried to find where Steam was installed and I noticed it was installed through Snap. I removed the Snap version of Steam and installed it through `apt`.

That made the logs work. When I looked at the logs, I noticed that some Wine files are inaccessible. When I ran the logs through Claude, the LLM identified that the disk was an NTFS disk so changing the permissions on Wine through Linux is unlikely to work.

From here I made a new partition with ext4 instead of NTFS. I then moved the game from the NTFS partition to the ext4 partition, as well as all of the Proton runtime stuff. It still was not working, but at least now the logs were showing me some additional information.

I decided to completely delete all of the Proton files and redownload them on my ext4 disk. I then launched the game and... it worked! So, the actual solution is:

MAKE SURE YOUR PROTON AND STEAM RUNTIME FILES ARE IN AN EXT4 PARTITION, NOT NTFS.

A bonus is to remove Steam out of the dogass that is Snap and install it through apt, but that was not the root cause of the issue.

[King Revoker]

I'm on mint and had some issues too. With a little chatgpt I was able to fix it and made a script so if this happens again I can simply run this and fix it super easy. You can give this a shot, hopefully it works for you too!

```
#!/bin/bash
echo "🔧 Proton Prefix Repair Tool"
read -rp "Enter part of the game name: " NAME
echo -e "\n📦 Searching for matching games...\n"

grep -i "$NAME" ~/.steam/debian-installation/steamapps/appmanifest_*.acf | grep '"name"' | while read -r line; do
FILE=$(echo "$line" | cut -d: -f1)
APPID=$(basename "$FILE" | cut -d_ -f2 | cut -d. -f1)
GAMENAME=$(echo "$line" | sed -E 's/.*"name"[[:space:]]+"(.*)"/\1/')
echo "[$APPID] $GAMENAME"
done

echo
read -rp "Enter the App ID of the game to fix: " APPID

PREFIX=~/.steam/debian-installation/steamapps/compatdata/$APPID/pfx

echo -e "\n🧼 Removing old prefix..."
rm -rf ~/.steam/debian-installation/steamapps/compatdata/$APPID

echo "📁 Recreating prefix structure..."
mkdir -p "$PREFIX/dosdevices"
mkdir -p "$PREFIX/drive_c"
ln -sf ../drive_c "$PREFIX/dosdevices/c:"
ln -sf / "$PREFIX/dosdevices/z:"

echo -e "\n✅ Proton prefix structure restored. You can now launch the game via Steam."
```

save that to a .sh file and chmod +x it, then run it and go through prompts. It's worked on two games for me now. Just enter one part of the games name, then it will search the steam install for games that would fit the bill, after that enter the appid of the game you want to fix and the rest is automated. This of course only works for the debian install of steam, but is easy to adapt to flatpak or what have you.