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?
Simplest place to start for any linux program troubleshooting is to get logs, and search-fu the errors. You want to try to decipher in the logs what the critical error is within all the lines, and why that might be.
One common example is a file not found error. Very often what file is missing is written, so you can search why that file is missing or you may be able to intuit it yourself.
A word of caution: when asking for help from people on forums, a tech whiz yoh know, discord or Lemmy, make sure you say clearly what it is you ultimately want, and what step doesn’t go right and how, that sent you troubleshooting. When searching, boiling down the search terms is important, but when asking people, context and the ultimate goal is very important. In the example, it’s not that you’re looking for the missing file, you’re trying to get a certain game to work and it crashes at the start, or whatever.