Proton-cachyos possibly flagged by anti-cheat (Helldivers 2 on steam)?

Hello,
I’m a total Linux noob. I’m only here because it’s the only distro with no hassle nvidia drivers that doesn’t reboot unexpectedly in the middle of gaming/allows me to use all my PoE flasks

For weeks I thought I had a Helldivers 2 lobby connection problem.

Until I was speaking with my friends trying to connect to their lobby and convo veered to switching to linux, problems with anti-cheat etc (trying to convert them by saying it’s not usually that bad, lol)

Light bulb lit up in my brains. So I decided to keep the HD2 support advice that hadn’t worked and moved to Proton Experimental from the official Steam branch and I finally gotta join my friends!

It was a pain because my azerty keyboard bindings which were immediately supported in the ship under proton-cachyos suddenly dropped to windows levels of borked both in ship and in game fighting enemies but it made me think : “is proton-cachyos triggering some anti-cheat software” ? To which my answer is “way above my knowledge”.

So I’m starting this thread just in case someone encountered the problem (search turned nothing but I could have searched wrong as English isn’t my first language and I might miss proper vocab) and think of switching compatibility layers.

Maybe if it’s happening a lot, you guys can do something about it as well, since you guys seem very active. If I can show you logs or stuff like that, kindly remind my noob ass how to step by step do so and I’ll provide happily. Not doing a ProtonDB report which is where I would usually go for that, just in case this is just me imagining things since I’m more in the “this is magic” team rather than “this is technology” one.

Your switch to Proton Experimental solving the issue makes sense—Valve often updates it with better compatibility for games and anti-cheat systems. Proton-CachyOS, being a more performance-focused custom build, might lack the same updates or tweaks related to anti-cheat compatibility.

Regarding your AZERTY keyboard issue, Proton Experimental can sometimes change input handling settings. You could try:

  1. Force Proton Experimental globally: In Steam, go to Settings > Steam Play and make sure Proton Experimental is the default for all games.
  2. Rebind controls manually: Check if the game allows remapping keys, as Proton’s handling of non-QWERTY layouts might need some manual adjustment.

If you’d like to investigate further, you can provide logs:

  1. Launch Steam with logging enabled by running:
STEAM_LOG=1 steam  
  1. Play Helldivers 2 until you hit an issue, then check the logs at ~/.steam/steam/logs/.

Alternatively, you can enable debug logs in Steam’s Proton configuration:

  • Right-click the game > Properties > General > Launch Options, then add:
PROTON_LOG=1 %command%  

This will generate a steam-<gameid>.log file in your home directory.

Post those logs here or in a relevant GitHub issue for Proton-CachyOS or Steam. The community or devs can help determine if there’s an anti-cheat interaction or something else at play.

Thanks a lot ! I saw someone opened an issue in the ProtonCachyOS GitHub on that exact matter for that exact game too! So I booted the game under proton cachy and tried to join a public lobby without success and was able to send logs!
I might send some more next Thursday if my friends can be troubled with some troubleshooting with me !

As for the keyboard, my first reflex was indeed rebinding the keys and it worked like a charm. I still hope proton CachyOS can solve this issue because it did solve a lot of keyboard input issues on my end that I would tear my hair out about back on Windows. So thank you so much proton-cachyOS team!

1 Like

Good Day,

I’m running into the same issue with lobby connections particularly with connecting to friends as well as public sessions. I used to use Proton experimental until around Oct '24 when it stopped working. I’ve tried almost every other Proton version available and am still unable to play with others online. Steam logs here

(The logs are too large to upload on pastebin or paste plain text)

Any help would be appreciated !

Edit - Should probably add that i’m using Steam (Runtime)

In the past, proton-GE has been pretty good at keeping up with these things. Might be worth giving that a try…

hey,
i just wanted to tell you to allways avoid “dxvk-async / dxvkgplasync” on any online game
it will never be here by default. But its better to know ( u may find some old threads on the web that give this recommendation)

But in general every ban for linux specific configs gets unban by games support.

i have a worst english than you and i dont worry. Les anglophones ne sont pas des “gramar-nazis” ^^.