[Ubuntu] Problem launching steam games from other HDD

Software & Operating Systems Linux
1

Running Ubuntu 18.04 KDE Plasma

I have the following NTFS drive automounted on boot where all my old Win7 steam games are located:

I recently tested Path of Exile on my Ext4 SSD and it worked decently with the default Proton, so I thought about trying more games. But I am reluctant installing more games on my SSD.

But when I hit play in steam on any of the games located on the NTFS drive nothing happens.
I also tried using Proton 3.7.8 Beta, but again nothing happens when I hit play.

I just discovered that Lutris can’t run the games from the other drive as well… sucks.

Has this something to do with permissions?

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Possibly. It’s not recommended to use NTFS for storing steam games, I think it’s because you can’t properly set your X permissions. I’m not that familiar with NTFS though.

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ntfs-3g tends to like to mount as root. You should use EXT4 on both Windows and Linux for your game drive in order to have it consistent. This is fully a permissions issue.

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okay ill try a new ext4 drive, thx for the replies

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You can use EXT4 on Windows? Is that new?

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Through a commercial third party mounting solution like from Paragon. Basically same as HFS+ software.

7

Ah, interesting. I never knew there was a market for that. Nice!

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Holy shit that’s cool.

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I initially was gonna recommend another tool, but it doesn’t support journaling, just like many free/FOSS HFS+ implementations don’t support journaling.

The commercial solutions do support journaling.

The alternate thing you could do is just format without journaling.

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Oh but journaled FS are so much more reliable.

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Which is exactly why those non-journaling options are not really options.

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While technically you shouldn’t use ntfs, it is almost definitely a permissions issue, as it will ‘work’, just not quite as well as a real Linux filesystem. The reason is that as NTFS doesn’t natively support file permissions, the permissions are set at the time of mount, I am guessing that you are probably mounting the drive at startup, if so you will need to add a flag to the fstab, but i’d have to double check what it is.

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man I tried to mount in fstab manually and fubared my install, so had to comment out the changes in safe boot and mount them through the GUI, won’t touch fstab anytime soon

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before you make any changes to any system files, like fstab, do this first.

sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.bak

That way if you do bork it, you just have to rename the file back to its original name and done.

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Steam has some problems with different file systems at times.
Even zfs doesn’t work right out of the box, from my experience.
Id use a ext4 fs for gaming, both because of better integration of user rights etc, on the OS, but deffinetly also due to performance, NTFS has some real performance problems in linux.