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.

If unsure, go with ext4.

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.

Yes, just deleting Boxtron folder from compatibilitytools.d should do it. You can always play it safe and move it to another location, eg. ~/backup/. Uninstalling dosbox-staging shouldn’t be necessary.

Steam compatibility tools, such as Boxtron, need to install some files in users home directory. These aren’t deleted when software is uninstalled with the package manager. You can check the directory ~/.steam/root/compatibilitytools.d to verify.

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 is Plasma Bigscreen that’s a modification for HTPCs. For touch screen based devices, a tiling WM is available for both Gnome and Plasma, though not baked in. IMHO bigger issue for both is a poorly working touch screen keyboard. This is something that SteamOS solves quite well.

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.

My best guess is that you have an GPU that either doesn’t support Vulkan, or has driver issues. But we shouldn’t guess, that’s what logs are for.

For Steam logs, running Steam from terminal as suggested is one way. Do note that error with wrong ELF class for game overlay library when starting any game is normal, since Steam tries to load both 32 and 64 for bit version for each game, and the wrong one will always fail. Arch wiki has more information.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Steam/Troubleshooting#Debugging_Steam

For Proton logs, set environment variable PROTON_LOG=1. You can do it in Steam launch options, see Proton Readme for more info.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton?tab=readme-ov-file#runtime-config-options

With hardware and firmware issues system logs often point to right direction. Again Arch wiki has a good tutorial on it.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd/Journal#Filtering_output

Games often have their own logging too if you need to go there. You’ll need to look those up, as they vary by game.

I hope this helps.

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

You could also point Steam custom launch command to PortalWars2Client.exe and leave the files as is, but I suppose you still could be banned.

Proton github has a possible workaround.

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/8010

Here’s my suggestion.

First, check your RAM with Memtest86+ or similiar tool. This is the first test because failing memory can and will corrupt your whole system, and it’s easy to test.

Second, if RAM is fine, check the logs. This is more effective then just guessing. Just copy-pasting possible errors to your favorite search engine usually points to the right direction. Archwiki has a nice tutorials about logs.

Third option is to test components one-by-one. Remove all unnecessary components, such as extra SSDs/HDDs, wifi cards, USB devices and PCIe cards. If it doesn’t help, test your CPU and GPU by running dedicated CPU and GPU benchmark tools. If you still get hangs, try with another PSU. If your components test fine, it’s likely a driver issue. See Arch wiki article on Nvidia troubleshooting for some tips about that.

Your last option is pure guessing. It’s the most time and money consuming way to debug with the smallest chance of success, but still many people prefer it. Most often issues like these are GPU issues, so it’s a good guess. However it’s still a guess.

I hope this helps.

Maybe try bleeding edge. See,

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/3898

First, make sure you are using EXT4 file system on your drive, and it’s on /etc/fstab. Then you could see if mounting your HDD to your main steam library location on your home dir fixes the issue.

It’s always a good idea to check steam logs to get a better idea what could be going on.

The issue tracker is here: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues

If you filter issues with keywords “external library”, you have 68 open issues to compare to yours. Eg. one is a shader pre-cache issue, disabling shader pre-cache may help. In another one people report needing to run a console command to mount the external library.

Hope this helps.

Acording to SteamDB, there has been no updates. I didn’t manually check all of the 355 depots though. I’d guess it’s either shader cache, corrupted game files, or a bug in Steam.

There is also Kaldi, but it’s not on F-Droid though.

https://k2-fsa.github.io/sherpa/onnx/tts/apk-engine.html