Arch Linux

PoutineErable

Member

Registered: 2024-07-08

Posts: 6

Using Windows game from mount with protons (on dual boot)

Hi, just for the fun of it, I'm wondering if it would be possible to mount windows Drives and partition (thats done), rhen add the windows game path to Steam and then run windows games.

But I have a gut feeling it could go wrong and cause problems.

Some stuff with either lacking permissions, or creating permissions. And possibly file corruption due to imperfect file system cross os (___ forgot the word. )

But I'm curious, how fucked would I be if I did it, and how much of a nightmare you'd think I'd be to setup.

Thank you.

hoppyhopps

Member

Registered: 2024-08-03

Posts: 12

Re: Using Windows game from mount with protons (on dual boot)

Good afternoon. 

Doing this technically works but can cause some corruption on your Windows' NTFS drive if done improperly. Luckily, Valve has a guide on doing so safely, including the steps you should follow to make a symlink to your compatdata folder. This is done so that files that cannot or should not exist within the Windows filesystem will instead be created on your Arch partition. I believe you said you've already followed this guide, if I'm understanding properly? The only difference that I found setting this up on my Arch install while following their guide was that my fstab needed to indicate that I wanted to mount the drive with ntfs3 instead of just ntfs, however it's possible that this is due to user error of some kind.

I tend to get better performance from games installed directly on to my Arch partition, but it does work, and thus far has caused no issues to my Windows install, if that's your biggest concern.

Last edited by hoppyhopps (2024-08-15 20:30:00)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,209

Re: Using Windows game from mount with protons (on dual boot)

Works fine here as well. ntfs3 used to be a tad unstable and could cause filesystem corruption (usually nothing a chkdsk from Windows couldn't fix, which is why you're strongly reccommended to keep that around if just for that) but it's stabilized quite well and haven't had any of these issues in the last few kernel series (like around 6.7 to now )