Running steam in KDE sometimes makes proton profile creation fail

Compatibility Report

• Name of the game with compatibility issues: Earth's Shadow
• Steam AppID of the game: 1655940

System Information

• GPU: RX 6800 XT
• Driver/LLVM version: Mesa 22.2.1
• Kernel version: 6.0.5-271-tkg-bmq
• Link to full system information report as Gist: https://gist.github.com/Patola/dbfea974fdbb08617b1585a48700161d
• Proton version: 7.0-4

I confirm:

• that I haven't found an existing compatibility report for this game.
• that I have checked whether there are updates for my system available.

steam-1655940.log

Symptoms

Don't even bother trying to read the proton log, it's basically only the header -- yes, it's empty.
Launching the game with no proton compatibility version set, or any proton compatibility version set (e.g. Proton 7.0-4, Proton Experimental, even GE-Proton-7-30) only creates the directory compatdata/1655940, a zero-bytes pfx.lock and nothing else.

Reproduction

• Set for Proton-7.0-4, before launching:
  [2:25] [6376] [patola@risadinha patola]% ls -l /jogos/steam/steamapps/compatdata/1655940
ls: cannot access '/jogos/steam/steamapps/compatdata/1655940': No such file or directory
• Press play, green button turns blue and immediately turns back green. Usually (for other games) it takes a few seconds building the proton prefix for the first time.
• After play:
  [2:27] [6377] [patola@risadinha patola]% ls -l /jogos/steam/steamapps/compatdata/1655940
total 0
-rwxr-xr-x 1 patola patola 0 Oct 29 02:28 pfx.lock
[2:28] [6377] [patola@risadinha patola]%
• The game files seem correct:
  [2:28] [6377] [patola@risadinha patola]% ls -la /jogos/steam/steamapps/common/Earth\'s\ Shadow
total 356
drwxr-xr-x 4 patola patola 4096 Oct 29 02:04 .
drwxr-xr-x 583 patola patola 20480 Oct 29 01:58 ..
drwxr-xr-x 4 patola patola 4096 Oct 29 02:04 EarthShadow
-rwxr-xr-x 1 patola patola 327680 Oct 29 01:58 EarthShadow.exe
drwxr-xr-x 4 patola patola 4096 Oct 29 02:04 Engine
-rwxr-xr-x 1 patola patola 7 Oct 29 02:03 steam_appid.txt
[2:28] [6378] [patola@risadinha patola]%
• I also verified that creating the proton prefix works for other games (tried with Aragami 2 that I bought in the same batch).
• I also tried to go to local files -> verify game files. No changes.
• After each attempt, I deleted compatdata/1655940
• I use regular ext4 for the filesystem
• the actual path is /jogos/SteamLibrary... and /jogos/steam is a soft link, but that shouldn't be an issue. There are hundreds of games installed there working for years. The filesystem is /jogos.
• There are 11 other games installed with ' (single quote symbol) in the common/ directory, so it's not that character

Start by reproducing the failure with Earth's Shadow (AppID 1655940) under KDE and inspect the attached steam-1655940.log. Compare the resulting compatdata/1655940 contents with a game that successfully creates a Proton prefix, then identify and verify a fix for the empty prefix and pfx.lock-only result.