Steam is being awkward. I use Zorin 12 Lite Core (yes, I know it's an old version, I have my reasons for not wanting to upgrade, I don't want to get into a discussion about that).
I can't get any games to run on Steam - it goes through "Launching" and then "Running", but nothing appears, and sometimes after a few seconds they close down again and sometimes they carry on claiming to be "Running" until I click "Stop". This happens with all the games I've tried to run on Steam, including Star Trek Online, VRChat, and a couple of free games - "Family Hidden Secret" and "Adapted Adventures: Crystal Cave" - that I downloaded just to test it.
I've tried setting them to use Proton Experimental and Proton Glorious Eggroll, but neither of those seem to make any difference.
Here's an example of what I get when I set it to make an error log using the command "PROTON_LOG=1 %command%" https://pastebin.com/PQDK67TX.
The games and Steam are both on the same hard disk.
Possibly this is just due to it being an old version of Zorin, but I thought it might be worth asking - might there be a way to fix this short of upgrading the OS, like installing a library or something?
Apparently, the computer is an HP Pavilion 15-cw0994na, specs here HP Pavilion - 15-cw0994na Product Specifications | HP® Customer Support, and it was new in 2019, I checked AMD's website for drivers but they don't seem to stock Linux drivers for a Ryzen 5 2500U processor which is what the specifications say this has (the specifications also say "Radeon Vega 8 graphics", but AMD's website doesn't seem to list that at all, and I'm not sure whether that's a separate thing or just part of the processor).
You could possibly stay on Zorin 12, but upgrade the kernel. Do realize that if you go beyond the distro version of the kernel, it may break things. Newer kernels have newer library requirements... essentially, at least going to 15.3 would do the same.
Backup your home directory and utilize Easily Reinstall to backup your programs. The customizations of the applications are in your home directory, for the most part, and will be applied once all of the applications and plugins are reinstalled.