Source
r/pop_os•
ASCI_Blue

Gaming experiments on Pop OS

Discussion

Running Pop 21.10, kernel 5.15.15, KDE Plasma 5.1.8, Ryzen 5600, RTX 3070, 16 gigs of 3600 MHz RAM. Running in 3440x1440. I think that’s all the important bits.

The experiment was to determine if ANY software can be used from an NTFS drive under a Windows 10 install.

Findings:

Steam and Proton craps itself and software simply will NOT run from an NTFS drive. The solution was install on a fresh drive via USB formatted in EXT4 and run it via USB C. There seems to be little to no performance issues using this method.

Lutris 5.9.1 with the Origin add on DOES run software from NTFS partitions with little to no performance hit. I experimented with Mass Effect Andromeda for a few hours today on not quite Ultra settings. Initial setup was a little off with various incorrect settings in game dealing with graphics like a virtual resolution and many settings at medium.

I’m by no means a Linux expert. I stumbled my way to getting Fancontrol working properly with my hardware, took too much time dinking with Steam before saying screw it. Took too much time getting a NIC on another machine going. And had a modest fight with Opera to get YouTube livestreams working. I post in the hopes that someone fence sitting may find my brief research interesting and helps someone take a step back from Winders with a degree of confidence.

Posted Feb 13, 2022, 11:26 PM UTC

66
doc_willis•

I am running steam games from a NTFS drive, shared with windows, and windows running steam is using the SAME drive, and same steam library directory.

Notes I made for people trying to use steam under Linux and keeping game files on a NTFS partition.

  1. don't use the file manager to mount the filesystem
  2. setup a fstab line to mount it at boot time
  3. you do NOT (typically) use chown or chmod on a mounted NTFS.

example fstab entry.

        UUID=1234-your-uuid-56789 /media/gamedisk ntfs-3g uid=1000,gid=1000,rw,user,exec,umask=000 0 0

On Ubuntu you can use 'ntfs' instead of ntfs-3g if you have ntfs-3g installed , it auto changes NTFS to be ntfs-3g. Other distribution may differ.

The various issues and problems with ntfs getting mounted Read Only still apply.

And ..

it's best to not use ntfs for this, it can be slower and more of a CPU load.

also.. there are a lot of bad/wrong/old posts/blogs/guides on this topic. so watch out for those.

bonus tip.

Steam scale ui Tweak.:

set a system variable to have steam scale up it's UI.

         $    GDK_SCALE=2  steam

PS: No idea how the next generation of NTFS driver in the newer linux kernels will alter things. Hopefully it will work much faster/better.

2
ASCI_BlueOP•

Thanks for the instructions, I may mess with them tomorrow while kids are at school.

1
doc_willis•

a side effect of the mount options used in the example - makes every file on that NTFS filesystem - show up as executable, and mode '777' - Which can be a bit of a bother at times.

2
reptilot•

You can run steam games from an NTFS drive. Valve has an official guide for this:

https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/wiki/Using-a-NTFS-disk-with-Linux-and-Windows

It's work for me for a long time.

2
ASCI_BlueOP•

I’ll check it tomorrow, thanks for the link!

1
[deleted]•

[removed]

1
redbluemmoomin•

I really don't see the point of doing this anymore though, if you're using Steam cloud saves seem like a much easier way to achieve the same end result. I can see it saves disk space and redownloading but meh. If a game absolutely needs Windows install it on there otherwise just stick it on Linux.

1