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 :)

  • @dwindling7373English
    1•6 months ago

    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:

    1. 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.

    2. 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).

    3. 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.

    4. 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.

    ???

    1. profit

    2. 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.

    3. 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.

    Any bright ideas?

    • @nottheengineer@feddit.de
      1•6 months ago

      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.

      • @dwindling7373English
        1•6 months ago

        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.

        Source: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Using-a-NTFS-disk-with-Linux-and-Windows

        • @dwindling7373English
          1•6 months ago

          For posterity. I think I made it.

          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:

          UUID=YOURDISKUUID /pathtothemountpoint ntfs uid=yourUID,gid=yourGID,rw,user,exec,umask=000 0 0

          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.

          I hope this help some fellow human down the line.