On pop_os I had great success with proton until I had to wipe my os and reload. Before, most of my games worked well. Cyberpunk 2077 actually ran faster than on Windows. After the wipe, I literally cannot get a single game to run and I really don't feel like troubleshooting so I keep returning to windows. I hate it. And yes, I have an Nvidia card and have tried several driver versions
Maybe check your kernel version? Is it the same major version like the one before the wipe? Nvidia drivers can behave differently on different kernel version (assuming you use an Nvidia card).
This is a good point. Would the version numbers displayed from apt list --installed be what I'm looking for?
As it happens I do keep a git repo that keeps a log of that information. I see that after reinstall,
linux-image-* and linux-headers-* packages have the same actual version numbers but there are some other values in that same listing that have changed a bit. Some look like git commit hashes. I dunno.
I did start with a different, updated Pop!_OS image this time. I've considered wiping again using the older image which I still have. I figured that using the new one would be best and just avoid the need for a few GB of updates but looking at the diff of the installed packages (and looking at differences in how I was able to resolve some random issues, for example previously I had pulse installed for audio stuff, now I do not, it's a different app), it seems like a lot of the OS internals are rather different...