I’ve backed up many of the Steam games I had installed in Windows. Am I able to use these on Linux or do I need to re-download them?
Yup, you’ll be fine. If a game has a Linux version though, you’ll still need to download some portion of it. By the way, just don’t use NTFS to play on Linux.
In my experience it works perfectly fine as long as you perform the steps outlined here, as per Valve’s official recommendation. The section about preventing read errors is particularly important, but the whole thing is worth a read.
THANK YOU for this!! I fought with ntfs in a new manjaro install last weekend and just could not friggin figure it out! So excited to see a valve better fix!
No worries, glad it helped!
Might be useful for dual-boot users or the people in transition, but doesn’t worth the hassle for exclusive users. However it will still cause some problems one way or another because it’s just a workaround.
Why not NTFS? Back when I used to dual-boot, I always used the NTFS on my shared games drive. Never had any problems, especially with ntfs-3g on Linux
It is possible that you didn’t have problems but it has a huge potential for that. WINE uses Linux symlinks and that’s the main reason why it’s not a good idea using NTFS for that, since when you boot Windows it’ll correct those files because Windows and Linux have different case-sensitivity. Basically Windows will corrupt those files and you will have problems regarding that. If you don’t boot into Windows you probably won’t have problems though. On the other hand if you don’t boot into Windows, why use NTFS. :)
Yep, I imaged my friend’s game drive to test this out (they have many games) and sure enough, some didn’t work after booting into Windows and later launching them with WINE. Thanks for the clarification :)
No problem! I experienced the very same thing when I was still dual-booting so I know it well. :) Other than media disk, it doesn’t worth sharing disks between Linux and Windows. And Windows still can cause problems there.
Most games were fine but some wouldn’t even launch off of ntfs
Thanks. I don’t mind dling some additional stuff I just would prefer to avoid the bulk of it.
No problem! By the way, if Linux version of a game is broken (you’ll encounter those), or if you want to use Proton regardless, set a Proton version for that game before installing and you can restore your backup without downloading anything.
Most of them can be transferred over as is. For games that have a Linux version Steam will download the Linux stuff. But usually all the assets take up most of the space and those are normally shared between all versions of a game.
Thanks!
Yes. I transfer games between a Windows NVME, Linux NVME, and a SteamDeck all the time. You still have to “download” them but steam will detect already existing files and check to see if everything is there.
AFAIK you can skip the “download” by also copying the corresponding
.acffile in the parent directory.Woah! I learned something new today. This reminds me that I should really pull up my sleeves and learn the dirty in’s and out’s of steam.
For proton games, yes. I still have some games in my old windows installation and they work just fine.
If you manually set your games to use proton, that will work for all of them. For the ones that have a native linux version, steam will detect that you have the windows version and download the extra files needed for the linux version automatically.
My uncertainty with copying a Windows install over to Linux has to do with proton/wine prefixes. From my understanding, when installing a game using proton it gets its own prefix installed along with it.
How does that work when copying a game over and adding a non-steam game to Steam? Does adding the exe to Steam create the prefix automatically?
The prefix is created on first run. The game files do not reside in the prefix.
Yes, steam will create a prefix for any game or exe that you add when you first launch it. That’s why the first launch always takes a minute or two.
The same exe can be used by windows and proton, so having a dual-boot setup with all games on the windows partition is feasible.
But there’s one very important thing about that: Turn off fast boot in windows before mounting the drive in linux, otherwise you will have to wait hours when booting windows the next time (which can’t be cancelled because microsoft).
Thanks!
Yes they can be. However, if you want to use a compatibility layer with them like proton the game files have to be stored in exFat (Linux file system format) format. If you have them on a drive formatted for NTFS (windows file system format) the game won’t start and wont tell you why. Games with native versions will run fine from a NTFS partition.
@beesterman @lightnsfw What?!? I run games using proton on an NTFS partition just fine…
If you do this it’s safer to use lowntfs-3g so everything is forced to lower case… And yes using a proper linux filesystem is way safer.
I just recently switched to Linux and spent a couple of hours trying to figure out why I couldn’t launch any games with proton from my NTFS drive. From my windows install. Moving my games over to a Linux FS fixed everything. But it’s nice to know it’s possible.
You’re not alone!! I just fought with it too for like a week and eventually gave up… what os flavor are you runnin? I was trying manjaro but even after shifting all my games to exfat something seemed to be bork 🤔 I was considering popOS but I’ve heard mixed opinions on that one!
I’m running Linux mint. I’ve tried to switch to Linux a few times but after the steam deck/proton and with the approachability of Linux mint I’ve actually managed to fully switch to Linux for my daily driver/ gaming. I still have to dual boot for the rare application or game I can’t get to run but for the most part it worked OOB especially for nvidia users. Plus the Linux mint forms are typically great about supporting new users without alerting the “I use arch btw” Linux horde that will just give you some condescending response and downvote you into oblivion for having the audacity to be new.
Plus the GUI is great and offers an easy out for beginners if they are struggling with changing something via the CLI so you can learn or just say fuck it and use the GUI cause it’s easier. I’ve since tinkered with LM for a while and will likely move on eventually. But it provides the perfect foundation for switching from windows IMO.
As for steam I would say that the local installation using the .deb from steams website works best. But if you rly want to you can use the flatpak but you will run into some frustrating issues regularly and some devastating edge cases so proceed with caution lol.
Thanks for the response! I’ll be giving mint a shot next for sure! 🙂
I’m guessing symlinking the compatdata folder to a Linux friendly filesystem, like Valve recommends here, would probably fix issues like that. I’m sure there must be edge cases but, in my admittedly not extensive experience, I haven’t encountered any myself.
So currently my backups are on my media server which is ext4. These would be moved to my gaming system when I wanted to install them. I would just need to make sure that was formatted in exfat for this to work?
No, in that case you’re fine. Exfat is really only good for shared drives. Just use the default of your distribution.
That makes sense. Thanks
Sometimes running applications from NTFS will have issues so I recommend doing rsync to a Linux FS before running
