If you continue to have trouble, drop me an email and I'll give you my configuration.
I very much second your sentiment about proton being "good enough". It's amazing! I have a less than stellar GPU -- a Radeon 570 -- and haven't found a single game that I can't play on 'ultra' settings at 1080p, including the in-development BG3.
After Apple's CSAM awfulness, my next laptop will be linux, ideally with a Zen processor, quite possibly running Manjaro and either KDE or i3.