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?

  • SavvyWolfEnglish
    6·
    3 days ago

    A lot of people are saying to just “run steam in a command line”, but for 100% clarity, to do that you search for an application like “terminal” or “console”, then into that just type “steam” and press enter. It should launch steam whilst also writing debug info to the terminal. If you’re lucky, it’ll show some things that are googleable, just don’t worry too much about things marked as “warning”.

    Another thing to check is that you have enough free disk space. I can’t count the number of times I’ve been trying to figure stuff out only for it to be broken because I ran out of space.

    If your Distro provides Steam in its software centre and isn’t Ubuntu, prefer installing it from there. The Flatpak version of Steam is also fairly serviceable. Both of these will take care of installing dependencies and getting everything set up correctly.

    I’ve not really needed it myself, but some people swear by Steam’s “verify integrity of game files” thing. But if you find yourself needing to do that frequently, back everything up since it can indicate hardware failure.