See, I feel you just failed in that attempt already.
But for the record, I landed on Manjaro with KDE Plasma and Wayland because I have an Nvidia card and HDR monitors and that’s the first one I tried where everything worked at once (I think on attempt five). And yes, I tried Mint first. Not everything worked at once on Mint.
Look, I don’t think the fix here is getting tech support. I’m trying to share at least one Steam library across my Windows and Manjaro dual boot setup (because that’s terabytes of space and I’m not made of NVMes and bandwidth) and I bumped into some combination of spotty Windows FS support and Steam’s weird bugs around temporary download storage on Linux (which has been a known issue since the late 2010s, btw).
Not all of that is Linux’s fault, technically, but it is broken and annoying, and if I lose the dual boot setup I have to keep Windows for a number of reasons, so that’s where we are.
For the record, it does work, it’s just buggy and inconsistent as hell on both the Linux filesystem support side and the Steam side. It’s not my problem, it’s Linux’s and Steam’s. Things that don’t work shouldn’t work a little bit and then break other stuff permanently. That’s just not a tolerable behavior for mainstream software.
You’re trying to use an open source OS with a proprietary closed-source filesystem. The reason it’s buggy is because the driver you’re using for accessing the NTFS partition is reverse engineered at a “best effort” degree. The driver isn’t complete (will never be until Microsoft open sources it), and one of the things that’s a sore point is running executables from an NTFS partition. Steam just does not handle it well and that’s not Steam’s fault or their problem to fix, nor is it Linux’s fault or their problem to fix. Frankly, it’s not even Microsoft’s fault either because they’re under no obligation to release their source code.
It’s not my problem
It’s 100% your problem.
Things that don’t work shouldn’t work a little bit and then break other stuff permanently. That’s just not a tolerable behavior for mainstream software.
You don’t use your cellphone as a hammer and complain that cellphones aren’t tough enough when the screen breaks. You don’t say “that’s just not tolerable behaviour from a mainstream consumer product”.
The solution here is to separate your Steam library between games you play on Windows and Linux. Or simply to commit to just one OS for gaming. If you choose Windows for that, that’s perfectly fine. No one is going to give you a hard time over that. You use whatever works for you.
But please understand that your whole argument here is that you created a setup that’s unstable (which is fine, I learned the hard way too), were told it’s unstable and why, then in the next breathe complained that it’s not your fault, it’s everyone else’s.
NTFS is a garbage filesystem in my opinion anyways.
Alright, you made three comments, I’m not responding to each of them. The response is the same anyway.
For one thing, the idea isn’t to find the “best FS”, it’s to find the best FS to share across a dual boot setup. The common suggestion is, in fact, to stick with NTFS. Which is broadly correct, it does seem to be the better option among those available. For the record, this isn’t about the quality of NTFS anyway, the same issues apply when using other cross-platform FSs, which is why I volunteered the info that I tried other FS options.
That is not a ridiculous use case, it is not an edge case. Another self-contradicting frequent recommendation among Linux cheerleading places is to start migrating with a dual boot setup and Steam absolutely supports importing pre-existing libraries from mounted external drives. Hell, this is a fundamental piece of functionality on the Steam Deck, even. I haven’t gone off spec for any piece of this. Every part of this setup is supposed to work.
This isn’t using a cellphone as a hammer and being shocked that it breaks, it’s using it as a camera and finding out all the pictures are out of focus. Using supported features in supported drivers and applications is not user error just because the implementation of the features is buggy.
This is an exhausting conversation every time. People insist that Linux is finally ready (it is inevitable, someone said) to take over for Windows, but when people bring up legitimate technical issues the answer is consistently that oh, well, this works fine on AMD cards, and HDR isn’t that important anyway and who needs surround sound on a PC anyway, and why would you possibly want to share 100GB game installs across two systems in the first place?
If your answer is that dual boot setups just aren’t viable, then great, but that means Linux itself is not viable for a whole host of use cases, including mine. I suppose that’s the ultimate takeaway here. Which I find, let me be clear, a shame.
it’s to find the best FS to share across a dual boot setup
It just doesn’t exist. NTFS is proprietary and really the only choice for a Windows setup, and for Linux NTFS just isn’t a good choice. The only reason people recommend it is that it’s the path of least friction for users that comes out of the box. I’ve tried installing and using an EXT4 driver in Windows and it’s not painless process, and functionality was serviceable at best, but this was at least 5 years ago, so it might be better now.
That is not a ridiculous use case, it is not an edge case. Another self-contradicting frequent recommendation among Linux cheerleading places is to start migrating with a dual boot setup and Steam absolutely supports importing pre-existing libraries from mounted external drives.
True, but generally you would migrate your game data from a mounted NTFS drive to a FOSS filesystem.
This is an exhausting conversation every time.
Yes, the ever changing landscape of tech is exhausting. Like Windows barfing all over itself during updates (I had to reinstall my wife’s desktop just a couple weeks ago because a Windows update completely destroyed itself), which has been a regular issue for many years now. And that doesn’t even touch on the myriad of other issues Windows consistently has, nevermind all the privacy issues with Recall and ads within the OS, or OneDrive without permission uploading all user’s local documents, deleting them (edit: from the local drive), and them holding the data hostage when the OneDrive account doesn’t have enough purchased space for it all.
People insist that Linux is finally ready (it is inevitable, someone said) to take over for Windows, but when people bring up legitimate technical issues the answer is consistently that oh, well, this works fine on AMD cards, and HDR isn’t that important anyway and who needs surround sound on a PC anyway
There are always growing pains, but they are getting less and less with each release. Remember that these growing pains are a result of hardware and software makers ignoring Linux, and the reduction of pains are being tackled mostly by volunteer work. But as the userbase grows, so will support for these things and the pains will eventually go away.
If your answer is that dual boot setups just aren’t viable, then great, but that means Linux itself is not viable for a whole host of use cases
No, Linux is absolutely viable for most use cases. Dual boot setups are fine also even with mounting NTFS partitions on Linux, what you’re doing is saying “my specific use case of storing games on an NTFS partition isn’t ideal, so it doesn’t work for anyone”.
If you really insist on using it, there ARE ways to do it, but it’s an advanced setup, Take a look here (at your own risk):
I did take a look there. I had it working before it broke.
I disagree that the growing pains are steadily going down, too. Maybe I’m just old, but to me the golden age of Linux “just working” is definitely not now. It was the early days of Ubuntu where the hardware itself was simple but the drivers were already new enough to be fairly standardized.
The thing that killed Linux getting bigger then was the lack of software support. Who knows where we’d be if those early “easy” distros had better, more hassle-free translation layers available.
Now? This is a mess by comparison. You have Nvidia with a near-monopoly on GPUs pushing proprietary features as a selling point, crazy multi-GPU laptops with a bunch of custom drivers, weird form factors, touchscreens, pens, arbitrary framerates and resolutions… it’s complete chaos. I’m not surprised Linux struggles to keep up (and Windows buckles under the pressure), but it still makes it harder to swtich.
Anyway, let this be a note that the handling of third party FSs and external mounted drives in Linux should get much better and Steam should start giving non-SteamOS distros some love, because some of these library bugs are old.
I disagree that the growing pains are steadily going down, too. Maybe I’m just old, but to me the golden age of Linux “just working” is definitely not now.
Well, you can disagree all you like, but it doesn’t line up with reality. Hell, I even have my parents on Linux and it’s working great for them. Since setting them up with Linux the amount of times I have to connect to their computer or even drive over there has gone down to nearly zero.
The thing that killed Linux getting bigger then was the lack of software support.
You actually have that backwards, but that’s neither here nor there. The reality is that Linux is more compatible than ever. Most services that anyone uses is done online in a browser. Most Steam games work out of the box, not including live-service and multiplayer games with prohibitive anticheat. Even most non-Steam games work without much fuss. Lutris makes many games a one-click installation.
it’s complete chaos.
Not really. It may seem that way, but it’s just the fast progress of tech. Frankly, Linux leads that progress because of its monopolistic use in servers.
let this be a note that the handling of third party FSs
Not going to happen, unless you want to have a chat with Microsoft.
external mounted drives in Linux should get much better
There’s no issues with external drives in Linux beyond the usual stuff every OS deals with.
Steam should start giving non-SteamOS distros some love
Steam has worked swimmingly on other distros well before SteamOS was ever a thing.
You either misread or ignored what I actually wrote, so maybe give it another look. Specifically, I said the issue with Linux in the early 2000s was lack of software support, not now.
For the record, there is plenty wrong with the way Linux handles external drives, at least UX-wise. For one thing Dolphin mounts them differently than a mount command, which is insane. In the case of Samba shares it also mounts them in an entirely different location, which is extra insane. And the whole thing keeps a distinction between drives included as part of the system and external drives, even if the external drives are fixed, so if you want to add your extra hard drives to the navigation path for software you either have to go messing with fstab (which is both risky and terrible UX for newcomers) or manually click them every time you reboot your PC.
By comparison on Windows any time you mount a drive it just gets a drive letter and as long as you don’t remove it it stays there. Samba shares, optical media, USB drives, hard drives… doesn’t matter, mount it as a drive, assign it a letter, navigate to it consistently for the foreseeable future. It’s just better.
Oh, and when digging for solutions to my issues I found some of the same problems I’m encountering reported as bugs in threads from 2020, with the same workarounds being suggested in threads all the way from then to now. So your definition of “swimmingly” may not be the same as mine.
And you’re wrong about Linux being less of a hassle now, too, anecdotes aside. Although I’m not surprised, given that your parents probably aren’t trying to game on a modern HDR monitor. “Everything works on a browser” isn’t a good argument for Linux. It’s a good argument for getting your parents a tablet and calling it a day (which, incidentally, is what I did with mine and I haven’t had to troubleshoot it, either; Chrome is Chrome).
Right. The issues is if you spend any time looking for an option to share a drive across OSs every answer online is to “just use NTFS, it’s good now”. It isn’t, really, but I also tried moving one of my drives to ExFAT to see if that was any better and… it kinda wasn’t. Same exact set of foibles.
The real annoyance, beyond Steam being just buggy about library management compared to Heroic, is how Linux wants to treat any drive like an external drive unless it’s part of the original install. Gotta say, I like how drive mounting works on Windows far better for desktop use.
every answer online is to “just use NTFS, it’s good now”.
The hell is it! MOST topics about using NTFS with Steam on Linux is do not use NTFS. I have no idea where you got that info from.
I also tried moving one of my drives to ExFAT
Just… why? Granted exFAT is more open than NTFS (did they completely open it, can’t remember, too lazy to check), but it’s also very lacking compared to other filesystems. It’s really just meant as a filesystem for removable media. Something that just about every system is capable of reading and writing to. Like a bare minimum amount of features all OSes can work with.
If you really want to try this unholy union of a setup, maybe installing an open source filesystem onto Windows would work (very slightly) better.
Now I’m in no way promising that this will work. Windows does a lot of crap at the I/I layer that complicates things, so you might still have issues. But I think it has a better chance than what you’ve already tried.
there is one company (paragon software) that sells ext2/3/4 (full access) and btrfs/xfs (read access only) drivers for windows, which worked pretty good for me, and they have a demo version for 7 days. price for consumer licences are about 30€. i didn’t try putting my steam library there tho, so your milage may vary.
But i would recommend what i did a few monhst ago: after 3 days with nobara 40 i just deleted my windows and the few programs that don’t work under linux now live in a VM; my mouse/keyboard software for creating macros only works under windows, but the profiles themselves are stored on the devices so they still work under linux.
I just love the BTRFS features like deduplication - its great for modding large games, saves huge amounts of disk space, and the merging of disks into a single drive in raid0 configuration is super easy and has great performance. NTFS feels just slow and sluggish in comparison.
Been using Linux for almost three decades now. Just use Linux for what you need it for. Use Windows for what you need it for. Stop using either OS for the sake of using either OS. Gaming on Linux has come a hell of a long way in the last couple years. In a couple more years, the gaming landscape will be wildly different. You can always reassess at that time. If you have a couple games that are your number 1 must plays and they only work on Windows, then just use Windows. Trying to cobble together some janky mess, it’s just not worth it at all. Personally, I just played the games that played on Linux for a lot of years. It’s great what Proton has done for gaming on Linux. But if your games or your work are still on the fringe for Linux, no hard feelings. Just use what OS you need. That’s how this is all supposed to work. 30 years ago before Microsoft’s vendor lockin strategy. We bought pieces of software because we needed that software. Then we bought the OS that that software needed and bought the hardware that that OS worked on. Then you’d look and see what games were available to you and that was it. You should do the same. Linux is taking over anyways. Microsoft’s vendor lockin strategy is coming to an end if they don’t do something soon. In 3-4 years from now, you will see a lot of investment into the desktop side of Linux. You can always come back then.
I mean, Linux is at a relatively stable 1-2% of the userbase, I don’t know that looks like “taking over” any time soon, or that it’ll make MS change course. I also don’t want to have to reboot my PC each time I want to do something different, you know? Linux is a bit snappier to interact with, but everything I do works on Windows, so that arrangement means not using Linux at all, indefinitely.
Well, sorta. It’s still what I use in a bunch of dedicated applications and small specialized devices. I mean as a desktop OS to serve as a Windows alternative.
Windows is dominant only on Desktop thanks to their Vendor lockin strategy. Everywhere else, it’s Linux (except game consoles). Even Linux is the dominant OS on Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform. Handheld PC’s are going to SteamOS. Even Microsofts OEM partners Lenovo and Asus are getting on board with their handheld PC’s. The reason they can do this is because Microsoft was forced to make Windows free on small screen devices (Build 2014). Linux has 80% of the IoT market. As Microsoft’s vendor lockin strategy continues to weaken, Linux will continue to take over. It’s only a matter of time. That 1-2% is only Steam Gaming world wide. For English speakers we are about 5%. Which, consequently is enough to get Day 1 Proton support for many Triple A game titles. 3-4 years from now, the games that will be releasing will have been developed from start to finish with Proton as a first class citizen. The Desktop landscape will be wildly different, no question.
Linux is a bit snappier to interact with, but everything I do works on Windows, so that arrangement means not using Linux at all, indefinitely.
Not sure why you think you are arguing. You said you didn’t think Linux was taking over anytime soon and you gave your reasoning. Makes sense. I made the claim, so I gave you my reasoning. As I said I’ve been using Linux for almost thirty years. I’m a Software Developer, obviously I would be using Linux professionally. I can understand if you’ve felt the burn from all the “Arch BTW’s” and the “Mint FYI” fanboys out there. Pretty sure I gave you unfanboy like advice by telling you to stop fighting a Janky mess. Get the tools you need. If that means Windows or MacOS or something else, then let that be it. That’s what I did. I needed Linux for work and I liked using Linux, so that’s what I used. That also meant I only had a few game titles that would reliably play. But that’s what I needed. That’s how it goes sometimes. That’s what I gave you the same advice.
Manjaro was buggy in my experience (used it for a year), and seems to be a well hated distro at this point. I am not suggesting that will fix your issues, just mentioning. I had a friend switch from Windows to Linux for the first time and Bazzite was the one that worked the best for their Nvidia card. As the other commenter said, dual booting on the same drive with Windows makes it a headache to manage.
I tried Bazzite, too, but there were issues there. Admittedly, they’ve updated their Nvidia support since, so I could give it another go.
But also, I’m not using this PC just as a gaming station, it’s a workstation, too. I’m not sure a gaming-focused immutable distro is going to be it.
The irony of it is that Manjaro has been best at this. I can run my workflow on it fine, and it’s snappier than Windows at that (and for other stuff, like retro gaming). It’s gaming-on-Linux savior Steam that gave up the ghost.
And frankly, I find when something like this happens everybody jumps to distro hopping as a solution. In my experience, if you’re trying to do something with sketchy support like this all distros are quirky.
See, I feel you just failed in that attempt already.
But for the record, I landed on Manjaro with KDE Plasma and Wayland because I have an Nvidia card and HDR monitors and that’s the first one I tried where everything worked at once (I think on attempt five). And yes, I tried Mint first. Not everything worked at once on Mint.
Look, I don’t think the fix here is getting tech support. I’m trying to share at least one Steam library across my Windows and Manjaro dual boot setup (because that’s terabytes of space and I’m not made of NVMes and bandwidth) and I bumped into some combination of spotty Windows FS support and Steam’s weird bugs around temporary download storage on Linux (which has been a known issue since the late 2010s, btw).
Not all of that is Linux’s fault, technically, but it is broken and annoying, and if I lose the dual boot setup I have to keep Windows for a number of reasons, so that’s where we are.
Found your problem. It’s simply not going to work and will give you headaches.
Well, then Linux is not an option, then.
For the record, it does work, it’s just buggy and inconsistent as hell on both the Linux filesystem support side and the Steam side. It’s not my problem, it’s Linux’s and Steam’s. Things that don’t work shouldn’t work a little bit and then break other stuff permanently. That’s just not a tolerable behavior for mainstream software.
You’re trying to use an open source OS with a proprietary closed-source filesystem. The reason it’s buggy is because the driver you’re using for accessing the NTFS partition is reverse engineered at a “best effort” degree. The driver isn’t complete (will never be until Microsoft open sources it), and one of the things that’s a sore point is running executables from an NTFS partition. Steam just does not handle it well and that’s not Steam’s fault or their problem to fix, nor is it Linux’s fault or their problem to fix. Frankly, it’s not even Microsoft’s fault either because they’re under no obligation to release their source code.
It’s 100% your problem.
You don’t use your cellphone as a hammer and complain that cellphones aren’t tough enough when the screen breaks. You don’t say “that’s just not tolerable behaviour from a mainstream consumer product”.
The solution here is to separate your Steam library between games you play on Windows and Linux. Or simply to commit to just one OS for gaming. If you choose Windows for that, that’s perfectly fine. No one is going to give you a hard time over that. You use whatever works for you.
But please understand that your whole argument here is that you created a setup that’s unstable (which is fine, I learned the hard way too), were told it’s unstable and why, then in the next breathe complained that it’s not your fault, it’s everyone else’s.
NTFS is a garbage filesystem in my opinion anyways.
Alright, you made three comments, I’m not responding to each of them. The response is the same anyway.
For one thing, the idea isn’t to find the “best FS”, it’s to find the best FS to share across a dual boot setup. The common suggestion is, in fact, to stick with NTFS. Which is broadly correct, it does seem to be the better option among those available. For the record, this isn’t about the quality of NTFS anyway, the same issues apply when using other cross-platform FSs, which is why I volunteered the info that I tried other FS options.
That is not a ridiculous use case, it is not an edge case. Another self-contradicting frequent recommendation among Linux cheerleading places is to start migrating with a dual boot setup and Steam absolutely supports importing pre-existing libraries from mounted external drives. Hell, this is a fundamental piece of functionality on the Steam Deck, even. I haven’t gone off spec for any piece of this. Every part of this setup is supposed to work.
This isn’t using a cellphone as a hammer and being shocked that it breaks, it’s using it as a camera and finding out all the pictures are out of focus. Using supported features in supported drivers and applications is not user error just because the implementation of the features is buggy.
This is an exhausting conversation every time. People insist that Linux is finally ready (it is inevitable, someone said) to take over for Windows, but when people bring up legitimate technical issues the answer is consistently that oh, well, this works fine on AMD cards, and HDR isn’t that important anyway and who needs surround sound on a PC anyway, and why would you possibly want to share 100GB game installs across two systems in the first place?
If your answer is that dual boot setups just aren’t viable, then great, but that means Linux itself is not viable for a whole host of use cases, including mine. I suppose that’s the ultimate takeaway here. Which I find, let me be clear, a shame.
It just doesn’t exist. NTFS is proprietary and really the only choice for a Windows setup, and for Linux NTFS just isn’t a good choice. The only reason people recommend it is that it’s the path of least friction for users that comes out of the box. I’ve tried installing and using an EXT4 driver in Windows and it’s not painless process, and functionality was serviceable at best, but this was at least 5 years ago, so it might be better now.
True, but generally you would migrate your game data from a mounted NTFS drive to a FOSS filesystem.
Yes, the ever changing landscape of tech is exhausting. Like Windows barfing all over itself during updates (I had to reinstall my wife’s desktop just a couple weeks ago because a Windows update completely destroyed itself), which has been a regular issue for many years now. And that doesn’t even touch on the myriad of other issues Windows consistently has, nevermind all the privacy issues with Recall and ads within the OS, or OneDrive without permission uploading all user’s local documents, deleting them (edit: from the local drive), and them holding the data hostage when the OneDrive account doesn’t have enough purchased space for it all.
There are always growing pains, but they are getting less and less with each release. Remember that these growing pains are a result of hardware and software makers ignoring Linux, and the reduction of pains are being tackled mostly by volunteer work. But as the userbase grows, so will support for these things and the pains will eventually go away.
No, Linux is absolutely viable for most use cases. Dual boot setups are fine also even with mounting NTFS partitions on Linux, what you’re doing is saying “my specific use case of storing games on an NTFS partition isn’t ideal, so it doesn’t work for anyone”.
If you really insist on using it, there ARE ways to do it, but it’s an advanced setup, Take a look here (at your own risk):
https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Using-a-NTFS-disk-with-Linux-and-Windows
I did take a look there. I had it working before it broke.
I disagree that the growing pains are steadily going down, too. Maybe I’m just old, but to me the golden age of Linux “just working” is definitely not now. It was the early days of Ubuntu where the hardware itself was simple but the drivers were already new enough to be fairly standardized.
The thing that killed Linux getting bigger then was the lack of software support. Who knows where we’d be if those early “easy” distros had better, more hassle-free translation layers available.
Now? This is a mess by comparison. You have Nvidia with a near-monopoly on GPUs pushing proprietary features as a selling point, crazy multi-GPU laptops with a bunch of custom drivers, weird form factors, touchscreens, pens, arbitrary framerates and resolutions… it’s complete chaos. I’m not surprised Linux struggles to keep up (and Windows buckles under the pressure), but it still makes it harder to swtich.
Anyway, let this be a note that the handling of third party FSs and external mounted drives in Linux should get much better and Steam should start giving non-SteamOS distros some love, because some of these library bugs are old.
Well, you can disagree all you like, but it doesn’t line up with reality. Hell, I even have my parents on Linux and it’s working great for them. Since setting them up with Linux the amount of times I have to connect to their computer or even drive over there has gone down to nearly zero.
You actually have that backwards, but that’s neither here nor there. The reality is that Linux is more compatible than ever. Most services that anyone uses is done online in a browser. Most Steam games work out of the box, not including live-service and multiplayer games with prohibitive anticheat. Even most non-Steam games work without much fuss. Lutris makes many games a one-click installation.
Not really. It may seem that way, but it’s just the fast progress of tech. Frankly, Linux leads that progress because of its monopolistic use in servers.
Not going to happen, unless you want to have a chat with Microsoft.
There’s no issues with external drives in Linux beyond the usual stuff every OS deals with.
Steam has worked swimmingly on other distros well before SteamOS was ever a thing.
You either misread or ignored what I actually wrote, so maybe give it another look. Specifically, I said the issue with Linux in the early 2000s was lack of software support, not now.
For the record, there is plenty wrong with the way Linux handles external drives, at least UX-wise. For one thing Dolphin mounts them differently than a mount command, which is insane. In the case of Samba shares it also mounts them in an entirely different location, which is extra insane. And the whole thing keeps a distinction between drives included as part of the system and external drives, even if the external drives are fixed, so if you want to add your extra hard drives to the navigation path for software you either have to go messing with fstab (which is both risky and terrible UX for newcomers) or manually click them every time you reboot your PC.
By comparison on Windows any time you mount a drive it just gets a drive letter and as long as you don’t remove it it stays there. Samba shares, optical media, USB drives, hard drives… doesn’t matter, mount it as a drive, assign it a letter, navigate to it consistently for the foreseeable future. It’s just better.
Oh, and when digging for solutions to my issues I found some of the same problems I’m encountering reported as bugs in threads from 2020, with the same workarounds being suggested in threads all the way from then to now. So your definition of “swimmingly” may not be the same as mine.
And you’re wrong about Linux being less of a hassle now, too, anecdotes aside. Although I’m not surprised, given that your parents probably aren’t trying to game on a modern HDR monitor. “Everything works on a browser” isn’t a good argument for Linux. It’s a good argument for getting your parents a tablet and calling it a day (which, incidentally, is what I did with mine and I haven’t had to troubleshoot it, either; Chrome is Chrome).
Well I tried. Sharing the same drive between Windows and Linux is a big no-no. It’s just not a thing Windows is designed to be able to do.
Right. The issues is if you spend any time looking for an option to share a drive across OSs every answer online is to “just use NTFS, it’s good now”. It isn’t, really, but I also tried moving one of my drives to ExFAT to see if that was any better and… it kinda wasn’t. Same exact set of foibles.
The real annoyance, beyond Steam being just buggy about library management compared to Heroic, is how Linux wants to treat any drive like an external drive unless it’s part of the original install. Gotta say, I like how drive mounting works on Windows far better for desktop use.
The hell is it! MOST topics about using NTFS with Steam on Linux is do not use NTFS. I have no idea where you got that info from.
Just… why? Granted exFAT is more open than NTFS (did they completely open it, can’t remember, too lazy to check), but it’s also very lacking compared to other filesystems. It’s really just meant as a filesystem for removable media. Something that just about every system is capable of reading and writing to. Like a bare minimum amount of features all OSes can work with.
If you really want to try this unholy union of a setup, maybe installing an open source filesystem onto Windows would work (very slightly) better.
Now I’m in no way promising that this will work. Windows does a lot of crap at the I/I layer that complicates things, so you might still have issues. But I think it has a better chance than what you’ve already tried.
@mudman@fedia.io
there is one company (paragon software) that sells ext2/3/4 (full access) and btrfs/xfs (read access only) drivers for windows, which worked pretty good for me, and they have a demo version for 7 days. price for consumer licences are about 30€. i didn’t try putting my steam library there tho, so your milage may vary.
But i would recommend what i did a few monhst ago: after 3 days with nobara 40 i just deleted my windows and the few programs that don’t work under linux now live in a VM; my mouse/keyboard software for creating macros only works under windows, but the profiles themselves are stored on the devices so they still work under linux.
I just love the BTRFS features like deduplication - its great for modding large games, saves huge amounts of disk space, and the merging of disks into a single drive in raid0 configuration is super easy and has great performance. NTFS feels just slow and sluggish in comparison.
Now that’s a use case I hadn’t considered!
yeah, and you always can fall back to your clean, untouched installation :-)
Been using Linux for almost three decades now. Just use Linux for what you need it for. Use Windows for what you need it for. Stop using either OS for the sake of using either OS. Gaming on Linux has come a hell of a long way in the last couple years. In a couple more years, the gaming landscape will be wildly different. You can always reassess at that time. If you have a couple games that are your number 1 must plays and they only work on Windows, then just use Windows. Trying to cobble together some janky mess, it’s just not worth it at all. Personally, I just played the games that played on Linux for a lot of years. It’s great what Proton has done for gaming on Linux. But if your games or your work are still on the fringe for Linux, no hard feelings. Just use what OS you need. That’s how this is all supposed to work. 30 years ago before Microsoft’s vendor lockin strategy. We bought pieces of software because we needed that software. Then we bought the OS that that software needed and bought the hardware that that OS worked on. Then you’d look and see what games were available to you and that was it. You should do the same. Linux is taking over anyways. Microsoft’s vendor lockin strategy is coming to an end if they don’t do something soon. In 3-4 years from now, you will see a lot of investment into the desktop side of Linux. You can always come back then.
I mean, Linux is at a relatively stable 1-2% of the userbase, I don’t know that looks like “taking over” any time soon, or that it’ll make MS change course. I also don’t want to have to reboot my PC each time I want to do something different, you know? Linux is a bit snappier to interact with, but everything I do works on Windows, so that arrangement means not using Linux at all, indefinitely.
Well, sorta. It’s still what I use in a bunch of dedicated applications and small specialized devices. I mean as a desktop OS to serve as a Windows alternative.
Windows is dominant only on Desktop thanks to their Vendor lockin strategy. Everywhere else, it’s Linux (except game consoles). Even Linux is the dominant OS on Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform. Handheld PC’s are going to SteamOS. Even Microsofts OEM partners Lenovo and Asus are getting on board with their handheld PC’s. The reason they can do this is because Microsoft was forced to make Windows free on small screen devices (Build 2014). Linux has 80% of the IoT market. As Microsoft’s vendor lockin strategy continues to weaken, Linux will continue to take over. It’s only a matter of time. That 1-2% is only Steam Gaming world wide. For English speakers we are about 5%. Which, consequently is enough to get Day 1 Proton support for many Triple A game titles. 3-4 years from now, the games that will be releasing will have been developed from start to finish with Proton as a first class citizen. The Desktop landscape will be wildly different, no question.
Yep, sometimes that’s the breaks.
I’m not having the fanboy argument again. You guys repeat the talking points that make you happy all you want.
Not sure why you think you are arguing. You said you didn’t think Linux was taking over anytime soon and you gave your reasoning. Makes sense. I made the claim, so I gave you my reasoning. As I said I’ve been using Linux for almost thirty years. I’m a Software Developer, obviously I would be using Linux professionally. I can understand if you’ve felt the burn from all the “Arch BTW’s” and the “Mint FYI” fanboys out there. Pretty sure I gave you unfanboy like advice by telling you to stop fighting a Janky mess. Get the tools you need. If that means Windows or MacOS or something else, then let that be it. That’s what I did. I needed Linux for work and I liked using Linux, so that’s what I used. That also meant I only had a few game titles that would reliably play. But that’s what I needed. That’s how it goes sometimes. That’s what I gave you the same advice.
Then use Windows.
Manjaro was buggy in my experience (used it for a year), and seems to be a well hated distro at this point. I am not suggesting that will fix your issues, just mentioning. I had a friend switch from Windows to Linux for the first time and Bazzite was the one that worked the best for their Nvidia card. As the other commenter said, dual booting on the same drive with Windows makes it a headache to manage.
I tried Bazzite, too, but there were issues there. Admittedly, they’ve updated their Nvidia support since, so I could give it another go.
But also, I’m not using this PC just as a gaming station, it’s a workstation, too. I’m not sure a gaming-focused immutable distro is going to be it.
The irony of it is that Manjaro has been best at this. I can run my workflow on it fine, and it’s snappier than Windows at that (and for other stuff, like retro gaming). It’s gaming-on-Linux savior Steam that gave up the ghost.
And frankly, I find when something like this happens everybody jumps to distro hopping as a solution. In my experience, if you’re trying to do something with sketchy support like this all distros are quirky.