shoulda been more verbose… ain’t no manager, when you select “latest” in lutris it downloads the latest proton-ge, that’s item one. then it downloads some steam runtimes, rt something, sniper something, can’t be bothered to repeat the ordeal, then it does the umu thing, spits out phonebooks of log spam and then… it craps out with various statuses. when you run it again, it doesn’t download it again, just runs the stuff downloaded.

anyhoo, I don’t got no steam on my disk and don’t plan on changing that, possibly that might be relevant

happy for you, it’s just plain wine for me. no variant of proton ever worked on any game I tried, so I just gave up on it. your post prompted me to try it again, switched to the default “Proton GE (Latest)” runner, it downloaded tons of stuff and… nope, craps out as usual, no sensible error messages in the logs. switched back to wine, started right up.