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
I see. I would suggest looking up other environment variables the Steam Deck sets on boot, but since this doesn't look to be the case, my second suggestion would be hardware spoofing.
But even then, it just doesn't make any sense. Why support only the Steam Deck specifically when it's well known that Valve is updating SteamOS to make it work with other handheld devices like the Legion Go? Assuming they put some kind of hardware checking in the game initialization phase, why go through all this effort just to lose potential players?