Pretty much, though you can make educated guesses using Proton_DB (links to both games) and filtering for your specific setup (your OS, GPU, etc.) since many issues will be OS and/or GPU specific. A lot of the time you can also find 'Launch Options' which can be pasted into box of the same name in the games properties menu. I.e. - VKD3D_FEATURE_LEVEL=12_1 VKD3D_SHADER_MODEL=6_6 %command% which is from a Debian user reporting issues with Talos 2. Since Mint is based off of Debian, that might work for you.

It's odd that it crashes Steam though... but I suppose that can be chalked up to the relatively poor quality of Steam since the gui update.

I have had the bugs with steam not launching games too. However, I can't remember if I need to kill steam in that case. But I definitely had that happen too. But that is a very rare case that any of that happens. Also, it was not because of a specific game, because after the steam restart it would work. Not sure what the problem is in your case, sorry.

It is interesting, that you have problems with astroneer. Last I played was years ago and worked fine (ignoring degraded performance), even hot-join multiplayer (joining dedicated would NOT work). Talos principle 2 was a bit finicky to get running for the first time, but then it's flawless. Please mind that I only use the glorious eggroll proton because it is most up-to-date. From my experience, the chance is veeeery much higher that stuff just works and do not bother with the included proton version steam provides. For every new game I want to play I just select the newest proton-ge I have installed and that is generally sufficient. If not, I quickly defer to protondb because the chance is high, that one poor soul already tried all combinations of proton version and weird config flags. I should have reviews for both games on protondb too.

I hope you can figure something out. Not sure with your steam client but maybe an ignorable issue if you get the games to work?

Oftentimes someone who does the same thing over again expecting a different outcome is called insane, except in this circumstance. Sometimes a simple reboot will fix, somestimes configuration will work, but for some weird reason every fix I've tried has increased the chance that a game works rather than actually fixing the problem 100%. Do I know why? No. Am I going to figure it out? No, I'm too lazy.