Is there any way to play the games I installed in windows in Linux?
I'm looking to try out Linux, but I don't want to have to re install all my games for it. I've got a 500 GB boot drive, and a 2tb where all my games are. I'd install Linux on a 250 GB partition of the boot drive. ty all :)
Yes, linux can work with NTFS drives with no issues. Just make sure to disable fast boot on windows (and check after every windows updates, those bastards will change your settings sooner or later) to make sure it shuts down properly and doesn’t leave the drive in a dirty state.
Then just point steam to the same folder as on windows and it will pick all your games up. If you start one, steam will create a proton prefix to make it run on linux.
If they don’t have cloud sync, yes. But most games have that nowadays, so it should be fine. Just make sure not to delete proton prefixes (which are what you call wines C drive) if they contain saves. I lost my borderlands 2 progress that way.
capitain jack sparrows editions usually don't have could save lol. ill make sure to save a copy of the files on an external drive just to be safe. to :)
Is that in theory or tried and true? I never seriously attempted it because I was afraid one of the two sides (of, Windows) would just go crazy and fuck everything up.
I’ve seen people recommend it all over the internet and I use it myself. I even start games that are installed on the windows C drive from linux without any problems.
I went ahead and tried it myself, I used to have linux friendly games installed on Pop_OS! and windows stuff installed on Windows.
This was not as smooth as suggested:
on Linux if Steam is the Flatpak version (like mine was) it can’t see anything outside itself (and I guess the standard library) so for a while I was stuck unable and cofused about importing my NTFS drive windows library.
my personal recommendation at this point is to install flatseal, it’s a tool that helps in managing granting new permissions to flatpaks, and grant it the capability to read, write and create (/whateverpathyouneed:create).
granting access to the folder containing steam library folder DID NOT WORD for God knows what reason, Steam saw it as “not under it’s control” and would not see the games inside but just, I guess, random stuff totally not steam games. I had to grant it access to the whole drive (we are talking flatseal here) and then in Steam I could successfully select the library folder and have it see the games.
All good right? Wrong. It all looks fine but none of the game launch with minor (native) exception. For example, Dota 2 (we are talking the windows installation) through proton doesn’t launch (it used to when installed from Linux) but it launch native (running very poorly I may add). The few games I had installed on the linux partition launch without issues through Proton. NONE of the “Windows” games is willing to abide to the laws of logic and just blueballs me by letting steam go through the N steps of downloading setting un proton layers and stuff, only to quietly go back to a the green “Play” button.
???
profit
So I’m sure there is something I am missing, I would exclude some permission lacking from the flatpak because of course I went and reinstalled Steam as a .deb and I had the exact same effect.
I think I will try to install a game on the windows library from linux and see it that is willing to cooperate more, we’ll see.
Have you disabled fast boot in windows? If you don’t do that, it doesn’t shut down properly and leaves the drive in a dirty state, which causes issues on linux. I had the exact same problem when I had that enabled. If you boot windows after mounting a dirty drive in linux, it’ll run chkdsk. That took 15 hours for my 4TB drive, so do it overnight.
Flatpak steam is also generally a bad idea imo. Steam is the kind of application that just doesn’t fit well into the idea of containers. But if you know how to use flatseal, just do that instead of reinstalling steam.
I was 90% sure I had that disabled for the longest time, but if your issue was consistent with my behaviour I’ll double check.
I read the opposite opinion on Steam, as in, so many dependencies that it’s better it stays within its own clean flatpak instead of risking getting some wrong dependencies in the wild.
Either way, I’ll let you guys know tomorrow!
Edit: after some browsing I’m considering also working on the naming of my windows folder, specially since the path to the library includes a space. I’ll make sure also my mount is proper and that it doesn’t revert to read-only for some reason.
All I said stand true, mainly the flatpak needing to be properly set up, my problem apparently was that I didn’t pay enough attention to how I mounted the NTFS disk. To be fair there’s specific disclaimers about it on most pages I looked at, but my heart was elsewhere.
Particularly my fstab had its own standard parameters coming from Gnome Disk, while it had to use the followings:
More specifically, I changed ntfs to auto because using ntfs the disk just… vanished :|
Now games run properly from both linux and Windows. Savefiles are, mostly, not properly sinced nor shared, mostly because Steam Cloud Saves is a bit of a mess. The issue would be easy enough to solve with some occasional copy paste or setting up Syncthing for every single game.
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