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Comment by zelon88 | Hacker News Reader

I LOVE Proton. About 85% of my Windows games just... work. And probably 75% of the 15% that fail initially only require a little tweaking to make work.

My only complaints are that steam uses arbitrary numbers instead of human readable labels for emulated AppData folders. It can be time consuming to locate a save game file. Also Streaming cross platform isn't a pleasant experience yet but it's getting better and I really appreciate the feature. My final gripe is that when adding media to a Steam chat on Linux the file open dialog does not cache the last folder you visited and doesn't support multiple files. This compounds the first problem I listed making it EXTREMELY time consuming to share multiple game files with friends quickly.

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Doesn't address the core issue, but...

IIRC, the folders that contain a Steam UserIDs save game data are named after the game's Steam AppID. You can look them up here (https://steamdb.info/apps/). I admit it's certainly not a solution to the discoverability problem when navigating a filesystem, as there are over 100,000 AppIDs and growing at this point.

They are. I always just google the game and copy it out of the store URL:

  https://store.steampowered.com/app/573100/Battlefleet_Gothic_Armada_2/
                                     ¯¯¯¯¯¯

These are exposed to the Linux filesystem, right? Can you just add a symlink?

Sure

Yes, but it would be nice if the Steam Client did that for us.

Could submit an issue/MR so someone could tackle it

You could also use [Protontricks](https://github.com/Matoking/protontricks) as such :

  protontricks -s <search_term>

and it will return anything that matches the search query with its appid like :

  Found the following games:
  Grand Theft Auto V (271590)

> My only complaints are that steam uses arbitrary numbers instead of human readable labels for emulated AppData folders.

Yeah, it's a chore. Sadly there really isn't a better option. The only option I can think of is to use the game's localizable name, but that gets pretty ugly very quickly (consider the ".HACK" series). Another option would be to re-use the game's data folder name, but that gets hairy with stuff like DLC and shared depots.

It's not really intended for users to be digging around in there, so... it is what it is.

They could just add a open save game folder in file browser. Would solve most of the cases.

Inside of steam, you can click on a game to browse local files. It works on Linux anyway, just opens my file browser to the right place.

I agree it should be rare, though I have had to do it for stuff that I wouldn't consider to be too advanced (using mods) but it's fair to say that it's still uncommon in the grand scheme of things since most games have a decent UI for handling mods already.

I maybe need to get to a game folder... three times a year? The only time it was more than that was when a modder I really liked stopped publishing releases outside of github so you had to copy them to the right place manually.

> Inside of steam, you can click on a game to browse local files.

This gets you to the game's install directory, not to the corresponding Proton prefix which contains the Windows user profile directory with the save file.

I don't have a filebrowser. For me it'd be enough if they had the number visible and hopefully allow me to highlight it too

>> to use the game's localizable name

Please no. I am glad that steam uses only numbers. That avoids capitalization issues when moving stuff between linux and windows.

They could use a scheme like `AppID-name` where `name` is the sanitized lower-cased title, e.g. `50631-hack`. From Steam's perspective it doesn't really make any difference, it could just ignore everything after the dash, but at least it gives the human an idea of what's in there.

This was what I was going to suggest. This is what the Nix package manager does where folders are hashes of the build dependencies. In v2 they suffixed the package name and version number.

I've noticed that people tend to build systems like these using only hashes and it's only later in the project they realize it sure would be nice not to have to look this up all the time.

The ideal for me would be to keep everything pertaining to a game - the game itself, Wine prefixen, Workshop items, screenshots, etc. - in one folder for each game. Like, how hard is it to put everything for, say, Kenshi into "C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\Games\Kenshi" or "~/.local/share/steam/games/Kenshi" (with "compat", "workshop", and of course "game" subfolders for the Wine data, Workshop items, and game data, respectively)?

Like, even if it ain't meant for users to go rooting around in Steam's folders (yet that's a very common occurence anyway), you'd think it'd be the sanest approach for developers, too (both of Steam and its games), no?

Do games ever have the same name?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(1993_video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doom_(2016_video_game)

Yes, though Steam may go to lengths to prevent games on their platform from having the same name.

Edit: this apparently happened with Prey 2007/2016, and resulted in two games installing to the same folder.

Often. Prey is another example.

THey could just use the numbers as a suffix to a sanitized version of the name and everybody wins, but that would require them to think seriously about usability.

PCGamingWiki includes the Steam Play paths for each game, so it's much easier to figure out where the files are.

Example: https://www.pcgamingwiki.com/wiki/Yakuza_3_Remastered

You can probably rely on the modification time as a clue; something like:

    find /some/place -type d -mtime 0

Any game you have played recently (with save-file updates) ought to appear as a file modified in the last X days.

It's even worse with Workshop items (on the various occasions where you need to make edits or otherwise troubleshoot 'em), since you need not only the game's AppID, but an even longer numeric ID for the Workshop item itself.

Luckily this is the same as the one in the item's URL for its Workshop page, but it's still annoying to have to copy and paste that into something just to see it (if doing it through the Steam client).

Workshop is one of those places where Proton doesn't work so well in my experience. I end up with lots of crashes and failure to start when trying to enable workshop mods in most games.

I've had the opposite experience, with Workshop mods usually working fine as long as the game itself is working fine. It's usually just the mod creation tools that are really sketchy under Proton (current head-against-the-wall experience is with Kenshi, where the Forgotten Construction Set will spontaneously freeze after a couple minutes under Proton).

I am a recent convert and can confirm. I am on PopOS and 9/10 , it just works.

Right now my only issue is with Fallout 4 sound disappearing, but I am slowly working on using qemu with Win10 image. I am genuinely thrilled, because I may finally be able to ditch windows ( from dual boot ).

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