I’ve backed up many of the Steam games I had installed in Windows. Am I able to use these on Linux or do I need to re-download them?

  • beesterman@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    9 months ago

    Yes they can be. However, if you want to use a compatibility layer with them like proton the game files have to be stored in exFat (Linux file system format) format. If you have them on a drive formatted for NTFS (windows file system format) the game won’t start and wont tell you why. Games with native versions will run fine from a NTFS partition.

    • Lupec@lemm.ee
      3·
      9 months ago

      I’m guessing symlinking the compatdata folder to a Linux friendly filesystem, like Valve recommends here, would probably fix issues like that. I’m sure there must be edge cases but, in my admittedly not extensive experience, I haven’t encountered any myself.

    • notfromhere@lemmy.oneEnglish
      1·
      9 months ago

      Sometimes running applications from NTFS will have issues so I recommend doing rsync to a Linux FS before running

    • lightnsfw@reddthat.comOP
      1·
      9 months ago

      So currently my backups are on my media server which is ext4. These would be moved to my gaming system when I wanted to install them. I would just need to make sure that was formatted in exfat for this to work?