I don’t think so. But there is a workaround utility called extest to emulate the XTest protocol that the steam controller relies on for cursors. I haven’t tested it myself, though.
Ah I wish I read that sooner, when the ntfs3 driver was released I moved my games to an NTFS partition, i don’t remember precisely but some wouldn’t work, and then unlike my ext4 or btrfs partition which were unbreakable, a lot of things became unreadable and undeletable after a forced shutdown. Probably my fault, but in any case i think it’s not worth the hassle. I only had games on it fortunately so didn’t lose anything significant
…and now I’m planning on making a btrfs partition for my games and using winbtrfs to use it on windows as well, probably another bad idea but I wanna do it so badlybadly
EDIT: Yup, it was a bad idea, sometimes getting blue screens when trying to empty the trash on the btrfs
That’s the NTFS3 driver for you. Corrupter of partitions… I had so many hassles, and it’s still happening to others recently, I don’t know why that thing is included honestly.
I was doing the same with winbtrfs, and it’s pretty good overall but kind of a mixed bag sometimes. The biggest pain is file permissions since winbtrfs isn’t sane and use something like uid 1000. So when you write or alter files or you’ll get file permissions errors on the Linux side. It’s workable just changing the permissions back when in Linux if that happens
Yeah,performance overhead aside, in Windows it reads and writes fine because of that. Anything thqt changes in Windows however will write the uid of that file as the windows SID I believe, either way I was using regularly the chown -Rf commands to reclaim files back in Linux.
It’s mostly a problem with how steam handles updates downloading to temp folders, etc… It’s the sharing of steam libraries that this happens to most often if you’re back and forth between os’s
when the ntfs3 driver was released I moved my games to an NTFS partition, i don’t remember precisely but some wouldn’t work, and then unlike my ext4 or btrfs partition which were unbreakable, a lot of things became unreadable and undeletable after a forced shutdown
Did you symlink the compatdata folder?
now I’m planning on making a btrfs partition for my games and using winbtrfs
I heard that with winbtrfs, you run into permission issues where every time you boot back into Linux, you’d need to chown any files you’d created in Windows, which would be a PITA. Also, I heard winbtrfs in Windows isn’t as stable as ntfs3 in Linux. Neither solution is unfortunately perfect so you may need to try and see what works best for you.
In general though, I believe regardless of what filesystem you choose, it’s recommend to NOT share everything and instead maintain a copy of the library native to each OS, and just share the “common” and maybe the “download” folder, and let Steam discover the existing files when you proceed to install the game.
I heard that with winbtrfs, you run into permission issues where every time you boot back into Linux, you’d need to chown any files you’d created in Windows, which would be a PITA.
You can set up mappings between windows and linux users so that btrfs will automatically set the correct permissions for files created in windows: github.com/maharmstone/btrfs#mappings
Did you symlink the compdqta folder um don’t remember it’s been too long…
Also I heard winbtrfs in windows isn’t as stable as ntfs3 in Linux :(
I’m trying to share stuff between the os because I lack so much space (500 Go for Windows + nixos + my old fedora silverblue parution that still has data I have to clean) fortunately I’m soon upgrading to 1To but I’ll probably fill everything again in a fews months 😅
Winbtrfs has some really funky bugs (some apps like Aseprite will somehow make files which get padded up to a round KiB size on disk which breaks some file formats, even though it doesn’t do that on NTFS or FAT), is way slower on Windows (longer loading times, streaming asset delay, delayed audio on some situations like RPG dialogue, Skyrim mods are especially problematic, blah blah blah), the extra permissions make managing it annoying, and symlimks generally just don’t work on both Linux and Windows at the same time no matter the FS which can occasionally be annoying. I really wouldn’t bother with winbtrfs for games unfortunately
ah too bad, I thought I finally had a solution for the lack of storage… I’ll probably do it anyway just in case I need quick access to one Linux game but the rest of the time I’ll keep them on the ntfs
Dropping by to throw some more praise onto the pile for Nobara Linux - it's my current distro and I have an AMD RX 6700 as well. All the games in my Steam library work great, including Baldur's Gate 3 (no tweaks necessary other than enabling the latest GE-Proton version). Unfortunately I haven't played any of the games you listed; my preferences lean mostly towards RPGs like Elden Ring, Path of Exile, Guild Wars 2, Valheim (with mods!), Enderal and so on.
Not the one you have been asking, but you can eigher install Lutris, and then install GW2 from there, or download it on Steam. Those are 2 fairly straightforward ways. If you have an ArenaNet account (rather than an account binded to Steam), but still want to use Steam as your launcher - just write “-provider Portal” in launch options.
OS that didn’t report what it was, probably a mix of ancient windows installs and Linux and other OSs that resist fingerprinting so they don’t tell servers what they are.
Amen. Folks seem to forgot the many other aspects that makes a game good in exchange of focusing on the least important aspect – how well s/he will play the game.
Just to provide a bit of contrast to the very helpful wall of text:
Debian/Ubuntu is fine so long as you allow it to use the closed source nvidia drivers. Ubuntu’s approach to long term stable (?) releases scares people a bit (and there are some ideological thoughts on how debian packages are set up that you either don’t care about or are already religiously opposed to), but… for gaming, pretty much none of that matters. Steam updates itself (or you update via the package manager) and you manage proton via steam or, if you are fancy, ProtonUp-QT. And then… that is it. The other concern tends to be that ubuntu is VERY snap/flatpak heavy these days which is USUALLY good but can get weird in terms of permissions depending on how you set up your file system.
Which kind of gets to the general “religion of linux” as it were. Generally speaking, partition your drive (or, just have multiple drives) and understand you are likely to wipe and reimage your install OS over time. Maybe there is a new distro you want to try and maybe you just managed to completely hose your machine and are now kernel panicking an hour before you leave on a holiday. But also that it takes about 20 minutes to repair a distro or completely change distros and then get all your preferred dependencies and configurations set back up. Whereas Windows… 20 minutes in is around the time Cortana is telling you that you just have to login five more times to start the install.
Same with drivers. If you want to stay as pure as Danny DeVito crawling on the floor? Go with AMD. They have MUCH better support for open source drivers (right now…). But the nvidia closed source drivers are good and you are already failing at being pure FOSS if you are using steam to buy and play games anyway. And as much as I love AMD’s CPUs… you are still better off price for performance just getting an nvidia one because dlss is that damned good (FSR is a generation or three behind).
But, again: Just experiment. Figure out what distro works for you. I like kubuntu for my client use because Plasma is really nice and things generally “just work” outside of a few really annoying bits where, increasingly, chatgpt lets me avoid having to filter through the angry greybeards on forums myself. And for server use I am usually in either debian or rhel/centos/rocky and that manifests as me getting cranky on a call when I type apt instead of rpm or dnf.
But you can find giant walls of text supporting anything. Hell, there is probably some lunatic out there who still thinks people should use SunOS. The key is to experiment and decide which flavor of crazy you are.
But also? I strongly encourage just keeping a 1 or 2 TB drive for Windows, depending on what you play. You can try dual booting but my general experience is that windows will always find a way to kill your bootloader and you are much better off just mashing del when you boot up to pick which drive to boot into. 99% of my usage is on Linux but I use Windows for gamepass PC, VR (although it may be worth figuring out how to get my WMR working with linux steamvr…), and… updating the firmware on my 8bitdo controller because I can’t be bothered to properly expose the usb device in wine. nvme drives are dirt cheap and most motherboards have at least two slots.
Thank you for the recommendations! I don’t mind having some proprietary blobs here and there - as you pointed out, with Steam and the games I was going to run on it, it’s basically necessary anyway, especially with a NVIDIA GPU. However…
I strongly encourage just keeping a 1 or 2 TB drive for Windows, depending on what you play.
All in all, that, the drivers being a bit behind on NVIDIA and the few annoyances that happen with external devices (like you pointed out, with a 3rd party controller) are unfortunately exactly the reasons I might not to switch just yet: while it seems to be more convenient to go full Linux for a few things here and there, but if I am going to need Windows, should I really bother keeping both installations? I’d have to buy a new, larger NVMe because my system doesn’t support that for now, reinstall everything anyway… And so far, I’ve been able to do everything I need without needing two parallel systems.
If that was sufficient to make you not want to use linux as a primary desktop: Cool. You would probably have been miserable the first time you had to use a terminal to fix a problem (which very well might be installing steam). It isn’t for everyone
But also: If you don’t think you have a need for windows (no gamepass, no VR, etc) then don’t bother keeping a drive. In my case? I know there is work to get WMR headsets working in steamvr on linux but I use mine maybe once a year at this point so it isn’t a priority to debug. And 8bitdo firmware updates are similarly rare (and I could probably get it working in wine if I cared enough). That basically just leaves gamepass PC for me and time will tell if I even bother to use the PC version of starfield or if I check it out on my xbox and then buy it on sale on steam if I like it.
At the end of the day: you know your needs and use cases. I personally like knowing that I can switch OSes at the speed of a quick reboot, mashing delete, sitting through 5 minutes of updates running, and then switch back in about 60 seconds when I am done. Good 2 TB nvmes have been going for about 100 bucks these days so storage is cheap. I could also have futzed around with partitions to share a drive but… why bother?
I’m a software dev, so I’m already quite used to using the terminal routinely. My current plan is to reconsider if I see an interesting enough NVMe sale - and there are constantly a few these days, so I just might, in the next few weeks.
After all the advice I’ve been getting thanks to this thread, it appears that I would almost be among the best candidates to switch: I mostly play single player games, nothing with anti-cheat and no VR, I’m having heavy doubts that I still need anything Windows-centric. The main downside I still see is the performance hog with an Nvidia GPU.
I have an Nvidia GPU and have had no problem playing BG3 or Diablo IV, for instance. Nvidia drivers are a lot better than they used to be, at least by my estimation.
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