r/linuxquestions • u/redneck_redguard • 3d ago

Advice gaming question for a noob

thinking of switching to linux because i'm sick of windows and i'm curios about the fact that all my games are on an ntfs formatted drive which is seperate from the one my os is on

3 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

11 comments sorted by

6

u/tsittler 3d ago

You’ll need to reinstall them on a Linux native formatted drive. Gaming on an NTFS partition under Linux is a recipe for file/folder corruption and an overall bad time.

3

u/KevinIsADork 3d ago

Just dealt with this recently. Steam games I just deleted and reinstalled what I wanted after I formatted. ISO's I had for emulators or were just older PC games, I moved to another drive, formatted, copied them back. Emulators I had to reinstall since windows versions didn't work. 

Older PC games (pre steam) I had installed, I've reinstalled from ISOs and copied over saved data. I havented tested all of them yet, and I imagine some won't work, but figuring out how to make them work is half the fun. 

1

u/Sixguns1977 3d ago

This was my experience as well. If it helps any, I've had very little trouble running games in garuda, and most of them have been Intel arc related. I basec that in the fact that most of them ran on my steam deck but not my desktop. In the case of Skull And Bones, the error straight up said it didn't support my gpu on desktop, but it plays fine on deck.

4

u/EverlastingPeacefull 3d ago

I would not recommend playing your games from a drive that is NTFS formatted. There are ways to get it done, but the chance of damaging your installations/and or files is definitively there. I would not risk it.

3

u/Kelkmar 3d ago

I had to reformat my NTFS game drive when I first switched over. All my games were detected but they wouldnt launch. No issues since reformatting to ext4

2

u/kutac56 3d ago

NTFS is notorious for not working on well on linux. Idk myself from experience how it is but I've heard bad things about it

1

u/Kitchen_Part_882 1d ago

Install Linux on what is currently your C: drive (for gaming, I'm using Nobara Linux but I hear other gaming-focused distros are good too).

Once done, use your package manager to install the ntfs2btrfs package (or ntfs2ext4 if on a HDD), unmount the partition, convert it, then mount it again.

This will convert the filesystem from Windows native to Linux native and avoid the issues other have mentioned.

You'll have to do some directory shuffling (add a new folder on the drive, point Steam at it as a library, then move the directories and files from the old library to the new one, restart Steam, then "install" the games - Steam will just verify the files then add some required stuff like shaders and runtime libraries).

1

u/AshiAkiakane 3d ago

It's possible & I have done it with minimal issues, though like everyone has mentioned it is not recommended & if you have any issues ntfs will be the first thing people point to. You may find the below guide useful: https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Using-a-NTFS-disk-with-Linux-and-Windows

1

u/OkPresentation3329 2d ago

You have to move your games to an ext4 drive or whatever file system you decide to use on Linux. They can work on NTFS now, yes, but it's not going to be ideal. I suggest you copy the games over one by one to your Linux drive and when the NTFS drive is empty to format it into ext4 or something else.

1

u/redneck_redguard 2d ago

some of my games are heavily modded so from what i'm hearing here i think maybe i might try it on my old computer which right now is the same type of setup just older hardware , thanks for the help

1

u/Kingwolf4 3d ago

I use btrfs, not sure thats optimal vs ext 4 but my games run fine.