How to import steam games from old installation

I'm done with opensuse and want to try a new distro; maybe Fedora or manjaro. The thing is I don't want to download my games again after doing a fresh install. Is there a way so I can backup my games to my windows partition so I can bring them over to the new linux partition later?

games are in /home/username/.local/share/Steam/SteamApps so a simple copy paste should work right? thanks

Just install the new distro of your choice, and check in the installer that you don't want to format the /home partition. After install, you'll still have the very same home partition, and your games will still be there. All games installed in Steam are installed in userspace, so they're portable by nature.

You can also use the Steam backup function to backup your games to say an external harddrive, and then restore them afterwards, if you intend to format /home or use another partitioning scheme or filesystem.

The easiest way is to install the Steam client in an lxc, and snapshot it. That will basically create an overlay file that you can store on an external medium, and just restore it into any linux distro, even on other machines. It also enhances the privacy of the Steam client.

ok thanks a lot zoltan