cross-posted from: https://sopuli.xyz/post/47762187
When I first installed CachyOS, my mind was blown away by how quickly and conveniently I could start playing my Windows games with it. With its
proton-cachyos-slrwine executable, it was only a matter of setting the game executable and runtime locations in Lutris and I could start playing the game immediately.However, ever since I updated my system with
sudo pacman -Syuin the beginning of May, almost every game stopped opening like it used to. Of those games, almost half of them would simply not open at all with any tweaking. The rest of the games eventually started to run but some of them were hit by performance degradation severe enough to not be playable.I tried to search for the cause on the CachyOS forums and wiki. I managed to find some posts somewhat discussing this issue, citing issues with the new kernel or the
proton-cachyos-slrpackage. Unfortunately following their proposed solutions like downgradingproton-cachyos-slror tweaking runtime settings in Lutris didn’t fix the problem.Eventually I moved on to the CachyOS documentation, mentioning an option of using an alternative wine executable
wine-cachyos. It wasn’t available as a regular executable option and had to be called manually, but eventually it allowed me to play most of my games like before.I don’t feel comfortable with this setup since the entire implementation feels like a hack instead of being an in-built feature, requires additional configuration process for every new game added and still doesn’t allow me to run some of my games that I have spent most of my playing hours on. I have been experiencing this for almost 2 months and I have been contemplating my decision to update my system.
Is there a way to go back to how my system was before without resorting to snapshots or a fresh installation? I don’t expect solutions as you would do in support forums; I am just in need of advice on where to start looking to solve my concern. If you need debug info or context, I’ll happily provide them.


Regression aren’t fun. To solve them, you need to do proper debugging.
First, take a look into logs. See the Proton readme on Proton logs, and Arch wiki’s article of journalctl on system logs. Also games have their own logs. When you have found a suspicious error, copy-paste it to your favorite search engine. Eg. Steam prints errors about game overlay on each start, and those are harmless.
Another option is to take a look into the issue tracker to see, if someone else has the same issue and found a workaround.
Third method is regression testing. It means going back to a working version, and testing each update to find out which one introduces the bug.
If these sound like a lot of work, it’s because they are. That’s why people often try random stuff that may fix the issue, or break your system, instead doing proper debugging. I personally don’t have time for it, so I have given up running rolling release distros.
I hope someone is able to give you the actual fix for your issue.