For the linux version (both GoG and Steam), there's a known crash-bug in the DaVinci version of Surviving Mars that affects some distributions (I've seen reports from Debian, Arch, Fedora) - see https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/index.php?threads/surviving-mars-linux-steam.1113701/.

Symptoms were that the game would crash on startup at the point where it was loading the main menu (the menu would appear briefly, then the game would crash). For those affected, it happens 100% of the time. Starting the game from the console would show an error "free(): invalid pointer" in the console when it crashed.

Haemimont have found the issue, and promised the fix "in the next update". They didn't specify whether that was a content update or a hotfix update.

Sam50 on the Paradox forums narrowed down the issue to somewhere in the networking code (so a temporary solution was to disable your network interfaces before starting the game), and from there ChoGGi has found and replaced the function triggering the crash.

If you do run into this issue, there is a bugfix mod available in ChoGGi's Miscellaneous Mods at nexus. The particular mod needed from that list is "Startup Fix Non-Ubuntu Network Crash DA".