I started with the proprietary drivers. I mentioned on Lemmy how “crashy” they were and someone recommended the Mesa drivers as they had good performance and stability.
When I tried to install the Mesa drivers, I completely removed AMD’s proprietary drivers first. I got the Mesa drivers to work apparently, but the mouse cursor was only visible on the integrated graphics display, kind of a common issue. After some troubleshooting I finally got the mouse cursor to show on the decicated GPU displays, but then I had no output on the other display. If I got myself a Display Port to VGA adapter I could quit using the dedicated video port, but at the time I don’t have one.
I know about proton. The original L4D runs quite well on Linux and required zero extra set up. However, I was quite disappointed when I tried the original Metro 2033 (not Redux either) with Proton, as it looked quite worse on Linux than on Windows.
Based on what you say, running Last Light with Proton could be interesting, tho.
I know this probably isn’t what you want to hear, but imho without knowing in detail all the changes you tried to make and the fixes you wanted to apply, the most effective method to fix these issues might be doing a full reinstall and starting again.