An Accidental Discovery

Darc Sceptor

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So I had heard (on a totally different forum) that there are changes made to some of the core of Steam games so if you install them under Windows....you cannot play them under Steam. With a good amount of work I got a Linux partition for games loaded up and accessible. But when I ran Steam, it had the Windows partition loaded up and said I couldn't remove it from the list of install locations. Okay. I set the Linux side as the default under Linux and then I went to install the programs that were on the Windows side.

My first game I focused on was Satisfactory and saw it was already in a queue for update. Along with the update it also installed Proton and Sniper so I thought why not and ran Satisfactory. I had to install the UE requirements (.NET framework and C++ library) but it ran without issues!

So it looks like Steam has advanced things to the point that you can run your Steam games under either side if in a dual boot environment. Now if only we can run Ryzen Master and the Graphic software under Linux!

UPDATE: If you are new to Linux and you have a similar setup, then you need to define your game library to be mounted at bootup. This is how you do it (at least on Ubuntu/Mint distros)

1) Mount your game directory
2) On Mint I run the application Disks
3) Select the volume you mounted (name will be the Nvme device name not your share name!!!)
4) At the bottom right you should see two icons one a square the other linked gears. Choose the linked gears and a contect menu will pop up.
5) From the context menu select Edit Mount Options...
6) This part was confusing for me at first. At the top is User Session Defaults which is on by default. Turn it off.
7. Now you have a checkbox for Mount at system startup just make sure that is checked and then click OK. Behind the scenes it does all the SUDO commands to make that effective for you.

Best yet with this process it does not require editing a system file or creating your own mount point. You use what the system created and every
 
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Using a NTFS disk with Linux and Windows

Compatibility tool for Steam Play based on Wine and additional components - ValveSoftware/Proton
github.com
github.com
PSA: Do not attempt to use Proton/WINE with the NTFS file system. Just do a search for it and you will come across plenty of topics about the subject.
 
Maybe you haven't read much of the responses. In general many people have pointed out innacuracies (regarding WINE) and just incorrect statements. For example, on Ubuntu, as long as ntfs-3g is installed using ntfs as the filesystem type will work
I have come across of plenty of other topics where people are still having issues when using an ntfs partition for Steam games, I'm not going to list them here. I have never had the need to try it myself and maybe those people didn't follow Valve's recommendations. However the ntfs-3g driver isn't Linux native so it will perform worse with games than when you use for example ext4, xfs or btrfs.

But try it and that way you can share your experience here, would be interesting to know if you do.
 
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PSA: Do not attempt to use Proton/WINE with the NTFS file system. Just do a search for it and you will come across plenty of topics about the subject.
That's all BS. Wine and Proton work just fine with NTFS, the only problem of NTFS is being too slow.
Otherwise all one needs to do is add this line to their fstab and reboot.

Code:
UUID="34EC5F3FEC5EFA96" /E ntfs-3g defaults,relatime,no_prefetch_block_bitmaps,auto,uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=000 0 0

where the mount point can be anything you want, it doesn't have to be /E. The most important parts are having ntfs-3g installed, the UUID of the NTFS partition and the entire line after the word "ntfs-3g".
The UUID of the NTFS partition can be seen with either

Code:
lsblk -f

or

Code:
sudo blkid

The first one makes it easier to read and find the UUID:

Picture_created_05-10-2024_23-44-48.png
 
That's all BS. Wine and Proton work just fine with NTFS, the only problem of NTFS is being too slow.
Otherwise all one needs to do is add this line to their fstab and reboot.
Not from what I can find and since there is one open Github issue about how it could be improved and one open Github issue about how Proton breaks when Soldier is installed on an ntfs partition.
If it's all BS then there wouldn't be open issues like this about it.

Seems that it should work though since there is official documentation about it.
But would people be report issues if there weren't issues that still can happen with running your games from ntfs partitions.
 
It is BS, it's just that most people don't know what to do. I moved all my storages to XFS about 12 months ago, maybe sooner than that - after I did some research on filesystems. Before that (9 years total - 4 with Mint, 5 with Arch) all of them were NTFS (with the fstab line I posted above) and one was ext4 and never had a single problem running any game from NTFS. Like I said, the only problem NTFS has is that it's too slow: if you run a game from NTFS and your music is on the same partition, your music might start breaking up at some point because you've reached the read/s speed of the filesystem.

So, if people have troubles running games from NTFS and I never had a single problem in the past 9 years with my fstab line, it's more than clear to me that these people are doing something wrong.
 
So, if people have troubles running games from NTFS and I never had a single problem in the past 9 years with my fstab line, it's more than clear to me that these people are doing something wrong.
lol not everyone is you. Since there are open issues about it then the documentation provided by Valve for it must not be enough since I still enough threads on Reddit about it and even people in those Github threads are complaining. What makes this more funny is you're always the bashing Windows yet you were using ntfs yourself up to a year ago.
 
What makes this more funny is you're always the bashing Windows yet you were using ntfs yourself up to a year ago.
Because I didn't know there were better filesystems. But now that I've seen XFS performance first hand, there's no power in the world that could make me go back to NTFS or any other Windows filesystem. Plus, as it turned out, when Windows can't read a filesystem, it doesn't do anything (unless you instruct it to), so your linux install and storages are perfectly safe from being tampered by Windows.

What I get from all these open issues is that Valve are doing what they can to solve the same problem for different computers and system configurations which is impossible - that's why their solution doesn't work for everyone. But I'm pretty sure if people did what I suggested earlier, their problems will disappear.

Maybe I should just open a new topic on this forum and explain in details how I made it work for me. Since it worked for me for nearly 8 years, I must have done something right, don't you think?
 
That's all BS. Wine and Proton work just fine with NTFS, the only problem of NTFS is being too slow.
Otherwise all one needs to do is add this line to their fstab and reboot.

Code:
UUID="34EC5F3FEC5EFA96" /E ntfs-3g defaults,relatime,no_prefetch_block_bitmaps,auto,uid=1000,gid=1000,umask=000 0 0
I agree with you. I found that I had only 1 game that had problems. It ran perfectly well but when it exited the next time I ran it the menu wouldn't appear. Run Verify Files and 3 files were always corrupt. However I did not have that line added to my fstab file. Do you thing this would address the issue of the corruption?
 
Maybe I should just open a new topic on this forum and explain in details how I made it work for me. Since it worked for me for nearly 8 years, I must have done something right, don't you think?
I would think the official Valve documentation should probably work since it has been updated over the years.

Using a NTFS disk with Linux and Windows

Compatibility tool for Steam Play based on Wine and additional components - ValveSoftware/Proton
github.com
github.com
In the one topic I mentioned someone replies of the 4 possible things that could break, so I would think they are still looking into that for possible solutions.
 
Do you thing this would address the issue of the corruption?
Corrupted/undownloaded files has nothing to do with the filesystem. That's a game dev's problem - mostly. But sometimes can be caused by too slow internet connection which comes with lost packages.
 
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