Borderless fullscreen should help here or at least it seems to when I have tried to improve Proton freeze dealings.
If possible, they could detect if things aren't moving for say 10 seconds (no pulse; frozen) then pop up an alert dialog.
But I agree that something should be done at some point.
Depending on your distro and flavor, you might have luck spamming the ALT-F4 shortcut multiple time to trigger a force close of application (like on windows). Also you may be able to open another TTY with shortcut like CTRL-ALT-Fx where "x" is 2, 3, 4 or whatever (CTRL-ALT-F1 should be your desktop), then login and open htop or similar program to kill to problematic app.
Not a solution but if you didn't know it can help recover a crashed desktop.
ALT+F4 works many times with Proton more so when its not frozen. But the other suffice to say < 50% chance.
Here's an Update on Steam/Proton crash and freeze all in one with log too...
gameoverlayui.log
Sat Sep 14 15:44:10 2019 UTC - GameOverlay process started: pid: 16297
Sat Sep 14 15:44:10 2019 UTC - GameOverlay process connecting to: pid: 16236
Sat Sep 14 15:44:10 2019 UTC - BuildID: 1568150115
Sat Sep 14 15:44:10 2019 UTC - Steam Path: /home/linux64/.local/share/Steam/
Sat Sep 14 15:44:31 2019 UTC - Got gameid on commandline: 618970
Sat Sep 14 15:44:31 2019 UTC - SetScreenSize from (1920, 1080) to ( 1024, 768 )
Sat Sep 14 15:44:31 2019 UTC - Changing resolution from (1920, 1080) to (1024, 768)
Sat Sep 14 15:44:32 2019 UTC - Warning: The game hasn't rendered a frame from us in over 10 seconds
Waited for about 10 minutes for the OS to come back from this. Shortcut keys didn't help, just had to wait. It was either wait or force reboot the computer thanks to Proton 4.11-4.
Since around that version that introduced FSync, I've had lots and lots of freezes and crashes in games that used to work just fine, too.
You can try to recover by sending SIGTERM to all processes with the SysReq+e combo. On Ubuntu that's enough to get back to the OS login. Then just reboot your PC.
Are you sure the issue doesn't lie elsewhere than in Proton? I saw absolutely no change in stability with latest version of Proton, everything still works great. Or are you also using the experimental Kernel that makes it possible to use the new features?
I've got a similar bug:
I use borderlands2 in proton 4.11-6, it runs fine (with PROTON_USE_D9VK=1 %command% and launcher.exe rename), I can tab out etc.
But after a round, when clicking exit on the game, my desktop is hung up completely and no hotkeys are working. My mouse works, i can move it around, but the desktop is in the state it was when the game was exit and I can't click or hotkey anything. I can still talk to people, so the programs itself are running.
I wasn't able to get into any virtual Console (Ctrl Alt F2) or kill anything via Ctrl Alt Esc.
What does still work is Ctrl Alt Print B, forcing a reboot.
Nvidia GTX 965M, 415.27 driver on KUbuntu 18.04 LTS
Maybe providing the Proton logs would help understanding issues guys, you know like what is asked when opening an issue.
Please add
PROTON_LOG=1 %command%to the game's launch options and drag and drop the generated$HOME/steam-$APPID.loginto this issue report
Do that as well on the specific game issue too maybe, if this is a game specific issue.
I started this issue in an attempt not so much to improve stability (that's a separate issue), but to improve the handling when stability failed.
I'll attempt to get some logs of this happening on different games. when I'm, you know, not in the middle of other things which a forced reboot will upset.
proton 4.11-6x1 2019-10proton 4.11-4x1 2019-09PROTON_LOG=1x1 2019-10PROTON_USE_D9VK=1x1 2019-10PROTON_USE_D9VK=1 %command%x1 2019-10
I've a number of games that will crash and cause a non recoverable (at least at my level of linux foo) state, causing me to hard power off to reboot.
I don't know if this is something that Proton could do, but if there were an easy way to kill such applications it'd be nice.
Many unity games when run in full screen have such problems when you alt tab them.
other games such as Homeworld Remastered freeze up on exit and eat the mouse cursor.
in such a state attempting to alt tab or command key might show the task bar but won't - for example if I alt tab to an open command prompt window, will not display it.