this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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Meanwhile, me running my whole Steam library off ZFS over NFS 😅
That sounds... slow. How is it working out?
NFS can achieve very high speeds. Unsurprisingly the biggest bottleneck is network bandwidth but if you have 10G or more dedicated it'll be fine
Yes, high total throughout, but latency would be bad, no? So things like dynamically loading new areas would behave more like a HDD instead of a RAID or local SSD.
I mean...Linux now has a good, mainlined NTFS driver. Sure you could use exfat, but even if you don't plan ahead NTFS works fine nowadays
There were a lot of problems getting proton to work on NTFS, but that's only because the COMPATDATA directory must not be located on NTFS. Worked fine the moment you symlinked COMPATDATA to your ext4 drive.
There was a time, where this problem got discussed almost weekly on reddit.
yeah, those were the days I got into Linux gaming and I was dual booting with steam games on ntfs partition. Pain, only pain
The problem is that the way NTFS works will not allow you to do symlinks and there are some permissions issues.
There are some workarounds but these might still cause issues.
That mainlined ntfs driver is fast but occasionally drilles holes in ntfs so I have to chkdsk on Windows. Also NTFS is not mount & play, you need to configure it with right permissions etc.
Wait, why not? I've been doing this for a few games so I can play on Linux or boot to Windows and play there if I need more reliable remote play or better performance. I haven't had any major issues, just annoying occasional proton reinstallation when I'm in Linux.
Wait a minute, Proton didn't shit the bed when you run games off of NTFS? Did you happen to set permission masks or smth?
the issue probably is that you had the proton/wineprefixes on ntfs which will not work
@MyFairJulia wait, you can run games from ntfs drives with linux? what ntfs driver is recommended for that? is ntfs3g broken? I'm asking because each time I try to do something like that, I do get permission issues, as you say. Worse, each time windows would make a file, the linux side would come up with a permission error when trying to access it. That's why, I don't use ntfs stuff anymore at all
I symlinked the game folders from a NTFS drive to steamapps/common/ on my ext4 drive, and it works fine. Of course the compatdata and shader caches are on the ext4 drive.
I run overwatch and rdr2 from ntfs partition with no problems. I just created a symlink from the default install path.
As a windows user, this meme both confused and frightened me.
Windows users don't need to worry about Wine/Proton
Ah I wish I read that sooner, when the ntfs3 driver was released I moved my games to an NTFS partition, i don't remember precisely but some wouldn't work, and then unlike my ext4 or btrfs partition which were unbreakable, a lot of things became unreadable and undeletable after a forced shutdown. Probably my fault, but in any case i think it's not worth the hassle. I only had games on it fortunately so didn't lose anything significant
...and now I'm planning on making a btrfs partition for my games and using winbtrfs to use it on windows as well, probably another bad idea but I wanna do it so badlybadly
EDIT: Yup, it was a bad idea, sometimes getting blue screens when trying to empty the trash on the btrfs
Winbtrfs has some really funky bugs (some apps like Aseprite will somehow make files which get padded up to the minimum file size on disk which breaks things, even though it doesn't do that on NTFS or FAT), is way slower on Windows, the extra permissions make managing it annoying, and symlimks generally just don't work on both Linux and Windows at the same time no matter the FS which can occasionally be annoying. I really wouldn't bother with winbtrfs for games
ah too bad, I thought I finally had a solution for the lack of storage.. I'll probably do it anyway just in case I need quick access to one Linux game but the rest of the time I'll keep them on the ntfs
That's the NTFS3 driver for you. Corrupter of partitions... I had so many hassles, and it's still happening to others recently, I don't know why that thing is included honestly.
I was doing the same with winbtrfs, and it's pretty good overall but kind of a mixed bag sometimes. The biggest pain is file permissions since winbtrfs isn't sane and use something like uid 1000. So when you write or alter files or you'll get file permissions errors on the Linux side. It's workable just changing the permissions back when in Linux if that happens
I read on the github that there is a registry key to set to fix this problem
Yeah,performance overhead aside, in Windows it reads and writes fine because of that. Anything thqt changes in Windows however will write the uid of that file as the windows SID I believe, either way I was using regularly the chown -Rf commands to reclaim files back in Linux.
It's mostly a problem with how steam handles updates downloading to temp folders, etc... It's the sharing of steam libraries that this happens to most often if you're back and forth between os's
when the ntfs3 driver was released I moved my games to an NTFS partition, i don't remember precisely but some wouldn't work, and then unlike my ext4 or btrfs partition which were unbreakable, a lot of things became unreadable and undeletable after a forced shutdown
Did you symlink the compatdata folder?
now I'm planning on making a btrfs partition for my games and using winbtrfs
I heard that with winbtrfs, you run into permission issues where every time you boot back into Linux, you'd need to chown any files you'd created in Windows, which would be a PITA. Also, I heard winbtrfs in Windows isn't as stable as ntfs3 in Linux. Neither solution is unfortunately perfect so you may need to try and see what works best for you.
In general though, I believe regardless of what filesystem you choose, it's recommend to NOT share everything and instead maintain a copy of the library native to each OS, and just share the "common" and maybe the "download" folder, and let Steam discover the existing files when you proceed to install the game.
I heard that with winbtrfs, you run into permission issues where every time you boot back into Linux, you'd need to chown any files you'd created in Windows, which would be a PITA.
You can set up mappings between windows and linux users so that btrfs will automatically set the correct permissions for files created in windows: https://github.com/maharmstone/btrfs#mappings