Well, that did actually help, I started testing on other machines and couldn't reproduce either.

I don't know yet what's the issue but when I changed from sway to hyprland on same machine factorio has no issues when launched from steam..

Definately not factorio bug, sorry.

Does not seem to make any difference sadly.
With steam same crash, factorio standalone client still works.

Arch linux

I did try the sdl2 from AUR, but switched back to sdl2-compat which arch now days gives instead of sdl2 as the game seems to work fine when steam isn't involved.
Also did try with regular steam and steam-native, no difference there.

On linux when launching factorio on steam with wayland enabled it just crashes.
Error SDLWindow.cpp:141: SDL couldn't be initialized. SDL_Error: Failed to create XKB context


0.000 2025-10-15 15:50:02; Factorio 2.0.69 (build 84148, linux64, steam, space-age)
0.000 Operating system: Linux
0 ...