It looks like a read error, so could be anything related to it. Permissions don’t seem too likely, but possible. Could be a character in the path that some windows compontent doesn’t like, or too long path.

You could try to see if moving Proton and the prefix of the game from one drive to another helps, but it just a wild guess, and comes with a risk of breaking other games. So if you are uncertain how to do it, I wouldn’t recommend trying.

Sorry I couldn’t help more.

Yes, I have had wierd issues with Steam and external libraries. Mostly because of permissions and non-acsii characters in the path, but some have been unresolved. Steam is really complicated piece of software. The host OS, Steam linux runtimes and Proton all do their part. Flatpak can resolve and cause issues. That being said, external libraries are well tested on the Deck, and should work fine.

First step with troubleshooting would be logs. Check the Steam troubleshooting page on Arch wiki, and Proton Readme on Valve’s github to get you started. You’ll need to add PROTON_LOG=1 to launch options to get a log out of Proton. Also issue trackers for Proton and the linux Steam client are valuable resources.

I hope you get it solved.

Nothing pointing to HW issues jumps out from the logs. It looks more like a GPU driver issue to me. To isolate further, I’d suggest:

1. Make sure that Proton doesn’t use your iGPU for Vulkan.

2. Try disabling DirectX12 in Steam game lauch settings.

Bit busy right now, so can’t look up links on how to do those right now, but I hope you can find out how to do those.

Without logs we’re just guessing. In addition to Proton logs, check the system journal aswell. ‘journalctl’ is the command for it. If I would be forced to guess, GPU driver bugs do often cause system to freeze. While at it, you could enable MagicSysRq if CachyOS hasn’t enabled it for you, and use REISUB to try to recover. Arch wiki will guide you with these better than I could.

Add your disk to fstab, and make sure jellyfin user has access to it. Mint may have a GUI tool Disks to manage disks, but reading the Arch wiki article is a good idea.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Fstab

Another option is using libpurple compatible chat app, and using steam plugin for it. These haven’t had much developement effort lately, but worked last time I tried them.

There are basicly two ways to go with regressions: bisecting or research.

With bisecting you restore a working backup, and try to isolate the breaking change. In your case you could try updating one package at time and testing. Since these are often GPU related, start with kernel and mesa. When you find the breaking update, you can either report it on your distros issue tracker, or git bisect it further to the breaking change in the source code to increase the change of it getting fixed quick.

With research, you look into relevant bug reporting databases. These include your distros issue tracker, Valve’s issue trackers both for Steam and Proton, DXVK issue tracker, freedesktop.org and kernel issue trackers.

These are a lot of work, so most people just try random stuff. That’s why you often get suggestions to do so.

Sorry I don’t have an easy fix for you.

Regardsless what distro you end up with, do your research before bying new hardware. Any hardware, such as keyboard, usb bluetooth adapter or gaming audio headset might be unsupported or supported poorly, and require out-of-kernel drivers, firmware or propietary vendor software, that work only with some kernel versions or certain distros. There often are options that have great linux support and work with any distro, but you’ll need to find them.

Pick your prefered update interval between LTS, 6 month point release or rolling based on how much time you have for administration. If you need you PC also for work, a rolling distro might break just when you need it the most. After choosing the update interval, pick the distro with chosen update interval you like the most. Say you know and like Debian but need a rolling distro, then Debian unstable might be a good choice for you. You can also run multiple distros and dual-boot.

Special purpose distros such as gaming distros can be a good choice, but they often have less developer resources and tend to die then the few developers lose their interest.

Regardless of your choice of distro, spend some time to configure regular backups.

Two most common reason for Proton not working are:

Running games from NTFS or other incompatible file system.

Issues with GPU drivers.

Anyway, we are just guessing here without logs.

Set PROTON_LOG environment variable, eg. “PROTON_LOG=1 %command%” in launch options of Steam for the game. Log will show in your home dir. See Runtime config options part of the Proton README for more info.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/blob/proton_10.0/README.md#runtime-config-options