[Guide] Everything you need to know about gaming on Linux

popcar2@programming.dev to Linux Gaming@lemmy.ml – 89 points –
popcar.bearblog.dev

Hi everyone, I just finished writing a guide on everything you need to know in order to game on Linux. It covers Proton (Steam play), using Heroic Launcher (with Wine-GE), and all sorts of tidbits and tips I wish people had told me earlier. I hope this can be useful to someone out there!

Archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20230816141640/https://popcar.bearblog.dev/everything-linux-gaming/

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The NTFS warning is a little disingenuous. I wouldn't recommend people go with it if they're choosing Linux only obviously, but I'm going to say with years of personal testing about 99.9% of things work just fine using an NTFS drive. I think it's been years since I had any kind of issue with game data that I attributed (and maybe falsely) at the time to the NTFS filesystem.

In steam you'll need to symlink your compatdata folder to a linux filesystem, but that's about it.

I don't even symlink compatdata and haven't run into any problems. The whole NTFS thing is wild :D

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I switched to BTRFS and used a Windows plugin that allows it to read/write to it. It solved all my NTFS and EXFAT issues and works great.

I've tried this also. It works alright unless you write files in Windows, it will set the UID to the Windows SID. WHen you use a Steamlibrary and move back and forth, games that are updated in Windows can give you permission errors in LInux, etc.

It's all workable and definitely an option, but WinBTRFS has a performance overhead, and the dualing permissions made it not a perfect solution.

Yeah I remember having permission issues that were easily fixed with chown but they were hard to notice. I haven’t booted to Windows in over a year now so I must’ve forgotten lol.

I'm pretty sure WinBTRFS's readme has a section about properly setting up the user and group permission stuff. Essentially just providing the Windows UUID to Linux POSIX equivilant, which generally ends up fixing all the permission related problems. The only real caveat is it not working with SuperFetch, so files aren't cached in memory and have to be loaded from disk with every read.

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