That seems an odd way to launch Steam. Proton works fine for me when I launch it from my DE (e.g. XFCE's menu, or its Application Finder), so you don't need a Terminal open. I'm not an expert in this area - what's the difference between what you're doing and what those DE functions do?
I had a similar issue, which was related to pressure-vessel (or so I was told), but it happened regardless of how I ran it. Changing Proton versions helped for me.
What desktop environment/window manager do you use (DWM, KDE, GNOME), and what version of Steam are you using? (flatpak, official .deb/.rpm, AUR, etc.)
As for this:
but it's annoying to have to have an extra terminal laying around for no reason.
Guake can reduce desktop clutter, if it annoys you that much.
Well it works, I reinstalled my OS because I ended up with a situation where I was too out of date to update, and the wiped any symlinks or wherever on my PATH.
I use xfce, and I'm not really sure what way I installed it, pretty sure it's not flatpak at least, it might have been the gentoo ebuild, but it's 4 years ago, so I don't remember all that well. The clutter isn't the major issue, it's more that something is broken.
"Is 1 minute old stable?"
Well, glad you got it working. Did you get any logs that might point to the culprit before nuking your OS? Otherwise if you have no other information to provide, I think closing the issue is safe.
Ok, I've solved this now, something got confused because ~/.steam/steam is a symlink. Using
.local/share/Steam/steam.sh & exit
to run steam makes sure everything works correctly.
Nothing extracted yet.
Proton, or possibly the games themselves, crash immediatly after you attempt to run them, however, if you start steam in a terminal
.steam/steam/steam.sh
as opposed to
steam/steam/steam.sh & exit
it works perfectly, not really a huge issue, but it's annoying to have to have an extra terminal laying around for no reason.