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?

  • @beesterman@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1•2 years ago

    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.

    • Stephen Greenham
      3•2 years ago

      @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.

    • Lupec
      3•2 years ago

      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.

    • @notfromhere@lemmy.oneEnglish
      1•2 years ago

      Sometimes running applications from NTFS will have issues so I recommend doing rsync to a Linux FS before running

    • @lightnsfw@reddthat.comOP
      1•2 years ago

      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?