[Support] Steam/Proton games won't start after fresh install

Hey everyone. I’ve been playing on Linux using proton for a while and stumbled across this scenario: you click “play” and the game won’t start, it doesn’t even bring up the “compiling vulkan shaders” card sometimes. This post is about a fix I’ve been using and wanted to share.

Use a process analyser (I use htop) to search for a process with the word “DIRECTX” or “DXSETUP”. This process should run right after you install the game and click to play for the first time, as a post-install script. In my experience, this process usually hangs and stops the game starting sequence. Since I know my Proton setup already have DirectX updated, I kill this process (using signal 9 - SIGKILL) and the game starts booting normally.

I’m currently using GE-Proton8-14 and Pop!_OS 22.04