Hacker News Reader

Comment by wiradikusuma | Hacker News Reader

I have a huge (already downloaded) library on Steam Windows.

Does anyone know how to "share" the game resources so that the Linux version only download the executable/runner?

Watch out, the suggestions in the other replies are hazardous. It's possible to add your windows Steam library to a Linux client, after mounting the windows partition, and this will work fine most of the time(so you could still give it a try). However, you're also likely to run into annoying-to-debug issues due to Linux's mishandling of ntfs.

I've eventually given up on this method, and I'm not sure if there is a good solution. I ended up just buying more hard drive and selectively installing the games I want in linux partitions.

Maybe share an exFAT partition? Is the support of exFAT on Linux any good now?

If you're intending to use Proton, FAT filesystems aren't recommended as they don't support symlinks or certain important filename characters like ':'.

I don't understand the last part. : is not a supported character on Windows at all. Windows games should not expect to be able to access file names that contain it.

Yes it is, the colon is NTFS syntax for alternate data streams.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/stre...

1) The colon is part of the syntax to access alternate data streams, i.e., it is not an actual part of the file name. In the same way that \ is not a valid character in file names, but it is used to delimit folders.

2) I seriously doubt any game uses alternate data streams for anything.

There is 'native' support in Kernel 5.4 which doesn't require any extra drivers. The other driver I've used before that is userspace so can be a bit slower but works fine.

You can avoid much of the download suck by making a (steam client) backup of your games from the windows system, then restoring that backup onto the linux system.

AFAIK that will avoid re-download of most of the shared assets where possible. You may have to start the install of things on the new steam client, then pause them, before it will let you restore the backups.

I just want to chime in and say you probably don't want to do this. Steam on linux can technically work with NTFS drives, but I've only had success running games that are linux-native. With anything that uses wine behind the scenes there are problems relating to file permissions.

I gave up and just created an ext4 partition and things got a lot more stable.

I haven't tried this myself, but you might be able to add the existing directory to Steam on the Linux side and Steam might be smart enough to download exactly what it needs, since all the assets are already present.

At least on Windows you can add an existing steamapps directory on the download settings page. If you can add custom library locations on Linux, I'd probably try making a copy of my Windows steamapp library, adding that directory in the Linux client and running repair for all individual games. That will at least save you from having to download everything.

I really really wouldn't trust a game across Linux to windows unless it was read only.

Probably possible, but when you have (for example) the DCS installer starting itself and possibly wiping the drive, I don't trust half the games I own to play nice enough to behave in a weird setting

It's a really good idea to just install it on each partition, but good luck...

if you can mount the Windows partition under Linux (ntfs) you may be able to link your Steam Library under the Steam Linux client, but you have to know that some compatibility issues will arise with non-Linux partitions.

Note that as the character ':' is reserved in NTFS, Proton cannot create its wineprefix in the NTFS steamapps/compatdata directory. To solve this, you need to symlink that folder to a filesystem that support filename with the character ':', such as ext4. More info here:

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Using-a-NTFS-di...

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/82#issuecomme...

Windows and Linux can share steamapps directory though, I've tried this by installing my games to an external SSD with NTFS filesystem and I can play the games under Proton on my PC and Windows at another PC. I'm not sure whether this will work for games that have native Linux version though

I'm having the same issue on my PC. It runs multiple OSes and I'd like to share the Steam library. I've settled for Ext4FS, which works on all the Linux distributions, but not on Windows. I wonder, has anyone tried to get this to work? There's at least 3 options: Ext4FS (Ext3/Ext2), NTFS, and Btrfs (which has a Windows driver as well).

With enough perseverance ExtFAT and UDF might work too.

>I'm not sure whether this will work for games that have native Linux version though

When you switch OS it will reinstall the version for that operating system. At least that was the case when I tried about 18 months ago

Reply on news.ycombinator.com