Arch Linux

wizardtonics

Member

Registered: 2024-12-28

Posts: 1

Mulitlib Steam Client and Mounting Removeable Media Permissions

Hello everyone beginner linux user here I am having some issues with my 1TB removable ssd and allowing steam to download things to it. Currently it can download games but when I tried a different proton version and it downloaded it I am getting a disk write error.

OS: Arch Linux x86_64
Kernel: 6.12.6-arch1-1
Uptime: 51 mins
Packages: 1373 (pacman), 14 (flatpak)
Shell: bash 5.2.37
Resolution: 2560x1440
DE: Plasma 6.2.4
WM: kwin
Theme: Breeze-Dark [GTK2], Breeze [GTK3]
Icons: breeze-dark [GTK2/3]
Terminal: konsole
CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 9600X (12) @ 5.484GHz
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080 Lite Hash Rate
GPU: AMD ATI Radeon Graphics
Memory: 4737MiB / 61925MiB

/etc/fstab readout of my removeable drive to auto add and try to give permisions.

UUID=0245-0A17          /mnt/sda1        exfat          rw,users,exec,nofail,umask=000,dmask=000,fmask=000,auto                  0  2

Mounted from /dev/sda1 to /mnt/sda1

Bonus points if anyone can tell me why minecraft is like 50% gpu usage and stutter on X11 but not wayland. Wayland I notice is like unstable and likes to break but when its working its like 3x faster.

Please bear with me as I try my best to explain my situation, I am a very new Linux user.

theRedCyclops

Member

Registered: 2022-06-17

Posts: 67

Re: Mulitlib Steam Client and Mounting Removeable Media Permissions

can you send the output of

ls -l /mnt/sda1

and

df

?

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 23,901

Re: Mulitlib Steam Client and Mounting Removeable Media Permissions

exfat is not able to do a few potentially necessary file constructs (e.g. symlinks) and not really advised for a steam library.

First and foremost, one main thing you need to be able to do if you want to use NTFS or exfat is either symlink or bind mount the compatdata folder away from the NTFS/exfat steam library into the compatdata folder for a steam library that's running on an actual POSIX filesystem, since proton prefixes need to be able to create files that are invalid on NTFS/exfat. see https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton … nd-Windows and in particular https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton … ead-errors -- you can't create symlinks on exfat and I've never attempted a bind mount here, "should" work in theory.

As for the perf issues, yes this is somewhat known on xorg, one thing that will help a lot here is if you disable the compositer which you can do with Alt+Shift+F12 on KDE at the expense of fancy graphics effects. Also to ensure there's no funky interaction going on, if you can disable the iGPU in your BIOS then disable your iGPU in your BIOS one GPU less that can lead to weird interaction issues.

And what does "is like unstable" mean concretely?  AFAIK most issues here should be fixed even on nvidia now and I can't say I had any instability the last few years (though I don't have nvidia HW to test, I only have a laptop without outputs attached to the nvidia card which makes it purely an offloader which takes a lot of complexity away)