GE-Proton Ships 11-11 Hotfix Fixing Star Citizen, Hunt: Showdown, and Video Playback Bugs
GE-Proton 11-11 went live today, and it is deliberately, almost painfully, small.
The release notes call it a "Hotfix Release," and they say exactly one line: "Changes since GE-Proton11-10." The tags commit c0c2ee35 and touch three things, a video playback deadlock, an Easy Anti-Cheat wall around Star Citizen, and a handful of protonfixes nits. No fanfare. No new features.
A day that started with 11-10
To get why 11-11 exists, glance twelve hours back. GE-Proton11-10 shipped at 06:21 UTC the same morning, built from eight commits. It was a full feature and stability drop: bleeding-edge Wine, DXVK v3.1.1-134, a D7VK rebase, and one controller fix that alone was its own story.
That controller fix is the connective tissue. The automatic PlayStation XInput fallback had been rescanning every HID device on every empty-poll since 11-8, stalling Path of Exile at a crawl and wrecking Le Mans Ultimate's physics. 11-10 mostly fixed it. 11-11 came in as targeted cleanup.
The video work is arguably the best part of this one. Three distinct regressions, all traced back to earlier 11-x releases: a DirectShow deadlock when you skip a video while MPEG-1 audio keeps playing (since 11-8); MPEG-1 clips rendering upside-down through AMStream (since 11-1); and heap corruption that crashes Target Bravo: Operation G.H.O.S.T. the moment you reach stage select. These are the kind of obscure media-pipeline glitches that barely register for most players but wreck visual novels and pre-rendered cutscenes for others. Someone clearly cares.
Then the Easy Anti-Cheat headache. Star Citizen was being booted with the "Untrusted system file" error (Violation 8, error 30033), and Hunt: Showdown showed the same kick when launched outside Steam. The fix stops VKD3D-Proton from reading the parent process's executable to sniff out Unreal Engine games. As a bonus, Halo: Marine 2, which 11-10 had broken, reportedly works again now. Crider also yanked the AMD AGS override that 11-10 had bolted on for Star Citizen. It turned out not to be the cause of the violation.
On the fix side, Star Citizen now installs .NET 4.8 for the new RSI Launcher. Windows version overrides are re-applied properly when a later winetricks install changes the OS version, so prefixes stop getting stranded on Windows XP. Entries landed for BepInEx, MelonLoader, and FrostyModManager. The sole credited contributor for 11-11 is @aderumier, a long-time DXVK and vkd3d-proton helper.
The hotfix itself drew minimal engagement: a single heart reaction. That tracks. It's a surgical patch, not a feature drop. Most Steam users will never even notice it. But for anyone running visual novels or Star Citizen through Proton on Linux, this lands right where it needs to.
The monumental 11-1 release from 24 June rebased the whole thing onto Proton 11 and spent four months gutting GStreamer in favor of FFmpeg. That rework is exactly what makes bugs like these fixable in the first place. It was also done partly with an AI agent. Crider said so plainly in the 11-1 notes: "Yes, I used AI for this work. No, it likely unfortunately will not be able to be upstreamed because CodeWeavers policy does not accept AI generated code."
That admission lit up Hacker News. The discussion ran the whole gamut, from whether CodeWeavers' clean-room policy would eventually force maintainers into LLM-assisted contributions just to stay afloat, to whether a feature-rich fork like GE-Proton actually keeps the mainline honest. One person even quit the project over it. Someone nominated GE-Proton for an "LLM-afflicted software" registry list. It's a charged subject, to say the least.
However, at the same time, that same CodeWeavers policy means this body of work can never be folded into official Wine or Proton, which is precisely why forks like this survive: they take the risks the mainline won't touch.
Getting it
If you want to update, the only supported route is the official repo, GloriousEggroll/proton-ge-custom. Grab the release tarball, extract it into ~/.steam/steam/compatibilitytools.d/, restart Steam, and enable Proton-GE under Settings => Compatibility. Frontends like ProtonPlus let you pick a version or just toggle "Latest." Head here to the repo's releases page for the current build.
Keep in mind that Crider explicitly says the only supported build is the one from his own repo. He won't help with unofficial forks, and he can't validate anything built outside his system. So beware third-party sites that claim to host GE-Proton.
One more heads-up for the auto-downloaders: both 11-1 and the later releases ship two archives, x86_64 and aarch64 (ARM). The ARM build won't run x86 games, and the auto-downloaders have genuinely grabbed the wrong one by mistake. If a game won't boot right after an update, check which archive you pulled.
Head here to the release page.
