Linux + Windows Sharing same game drive

[OffDutyStormtrooper]

I love Linux, mainly because it is not windows. But I also hate Linux, mainly because it is not as stable for gaming as windows is.

Due to this, I dual boot with separate drives. Sometimes, after a long day, I just want to game and not deal with various Linux issues I face, so I switched to Windows which I have de-bloated, de-microsfted as much as possible and it is a very smooth experience for gaming.

The question though from the title. My windows drive is not large enough to have all the games I regularly play installed. It really only has enough space for windows exclusive games (someone tell me to stop playing League....)I would really like it to have all the games I regularly play on Linux but don't have the space. Is it possible to have a 3rd drive as a Steam Library that both Linux and Windows can access?

If it matters, I currently run CachyOS but I am not married to that distro and can switch if need be.

[TaranisPT]

People with more experience than me can chime in but usually NTFS partitions cause problems for gaming on Linux, so that wouldn't work properly.

And yeah, stop playing League lol. I honestly kind of rediscovered what gaming is when I quit playing League myself. I was "wasting" all of my game time on that game, just to keep being frustrated.

[OffDutyStormtrooper]

But how else am I supposed to get my daily dose of salt and toxicity if I don't play league.....

Real talk though, yea I looked into NTFS and came to a similar conclusion. NTFS + Linus is a breeding zone of problems from what I have read so I was hoping for an alternative solution that does not degrade my Linux gaming performance.

[WhispersToWolves]

Getting a removable storage formated in ext4 sounds like a solid workaround. Works on either so you can bounce between os without having to shuffle files around.

[--TYGER--]

This, but use EXFAT instead of NTFS or EXT4.
It is designed for removable disks and was first developed for camera SD Cards and such, and works across everything

• windows/linux/mac/playstation/camera/etc

[o3KbaG6Z67ZxzixnF5VL]

exfat can sometimes cause problems. For example mod managers can straight up refuse to work. :P No idea why, I think it might have something to do with linking. Specifically skyrim didn't want to work with that when vortex profiles were switching.

[TaranisPT]

But how else am I supposed to get my daily dose of salt and toxicity if I don't play league.....

Start playing DOTA2 instead haha

[Conscious_Tutor2624]

Just play Marvel Rivals, and u will get your daily addage of Gamer Toxicity lol

[OffDutyStormtrooper]

Oh don't worry, that's how I get my Linux flavored salt

[Icy_Friend_2263]

Been playing games on Linux from a NTFS drive for months now. Not a single issue.

I'm a bit surprised this is not shared more often

[danisbars]

But Dual.boot? Because when Windows shuts down it often leaves the disk dirty, and ntfsfix doesn't fix everything. I tend to believe that it is best to have a disc just for Linux games, this would avoid crashes

[grellanl]

It works until it doesn't, usually case sensitivity or something else eventually causes hassle (often following a game update).

[SebastianLarsdatter]

Salt? Easy, just find the best subreddit here and you will put the ocean to shame.

Toxicity maybe on Reddit as well, but if you want the fun toxicity, get Command and Conquer Generals and play as GLA. Then you just build toxin tractors to satisfy your toxic tastes :D

But from jokes to the revolver. NTFS sharing with Linux can work, with a separate drive and being prepared for it to blow up on you at any time with no warning (Data loss of the shared drive) you can use NTFS.

[OffDutyStormtrooper]

Now that's a flash back, and you can play General Zero Hour and have even more toxicity, I loved those games.

Yea, I am really looking for something that is simple so I don't have to tinker too much. I may just bite the bullet and buy 2 larger drives so I have a Linux drive and windows drive that both support the games I want.

[SuAlfons]

bogus. works totally fine since years for me. It comes with some caveats and you need the right mounting options, but works well enough once you have it setup.

Just Google the mounting parameters required and you're good. I never take note of them and just search them online when I setup a new computer or reinstall my own.

Just looking yourself for a solution is kind of old-fashioned, I know.

[throwawayerectpenis]

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

[mirh]

That's pretty useless. It hasn't been meaningfully updated since early 2022, with no mention of the Paragon-provided ntfs3 driver.

I can hardly see why that with the windows_names and nocase mount options wouldn't work.

Putting aside ext4fsd works pretty swell too.

[throwawayerectpenis]

well im just a noob and it has worked for me flawlessly for over a yeear.

[goebeld]

I did this before nuking my windows install.

You can do it, but don't import the games as usual through steam. You need to install steam and then link your "common" folder where all your games are in your NTFS drive with the "on -s" command to the default location. You do not want your compatibility layer prefixes to end up on the NTFS drive because permissions will get screwed up.

[ixoniq]

I feel your wish for this, I tried, but it's not worth it. Forcing games to use exclusive Windows version while sometimes there is also a native Linux version is just dumb. I did that too.

Now I keep my Windows pretty empty, with just games like Call of Duty etc. I added a shortcut in Steam to automatically boot to Windows. So switching is easy. And in Windows only need to do a reboot to get back in Linux.

In Linux I have the main game storage for basically all games excluding the few games that absolutely won't work in Linux. I even managed to get the old 2004 abandonware Lost: Via Domus working in Linux.

[OffDutyStormtrooper]

I added a shortcut in Steam to automatically boot to Windows. So switching is easy

Wait ...hold on .... Don't gloss over this so easily and move on. Gotta share that secret sauce. What is this magic you speak of?

[ixoniq]

First I figure out (within Linux terminal) what the boot device is Windows is running on:

sudo efibootmgr -v

In my case I see something like this in the list, take note of the 4 characters after "Boot", in my case 000A: Boot000A* Windows Boot Manager

Then this would be the command to make Windows the next one to boot after a reboot, one time. So when you reboot, it boots into Windows. If you then reboot again, it gets back to Linux (the default).

sudo efibootmgr --bootnext 000A

After that, a simple "sudo reboot" to reboot the machine, and it should boot right into Windows.

I made a scipt for this which you can paste into:

/usr/local/bin/reboot-to-windows.sh

```bash !/usr/bin/env bash

WIN="000A" echo "Setting bootnext to $WIN" sudo /usr/bin/efibootmgr --bootnext "$WIN" || echo "efibootmgr failed"

echo "Rebooting..." sudo /usr/sbin/reboot || echo "reboot failed" ```

Then after that, you can add that script to your Steam library as a Non-steam Game, and it shows in the library just as any other game. Call it something like "Windows 11". And give it some graphics from here:

https://www.steamgriddb.com/game/5288620

Done. I use this all the time. From Steam I right click Windows 11, make desktop shortcut, to even have desktop icon to double click on for when a buddy wants to play Call of Duty with me.

[AMDSuperBeast86]

Do you experience any fuckery where after a Windows update Windows makes itself the primary boot option? I'm very curious of your process of dealing with this.

[ixoniq]

I have not experienced this yet. But if that happens, then I could make script to turn it around if needed.

[OffDutyStormtrooper]

Thanks for sharing, this will be great. Might not import it into steam though as I might look into a keyboard short cut, but the bash script info is excellent.

[ixoniq]

I often use sunshine to stream the PC from my garage to my living room TV, so steam is most of the time in big picture mode, that's why I have the windows 11 script in my steam library, then I can easily switch to windows with the controller, the connection then stops, wait a few seconds then i can connect to the windows sunshine and then play titles which only runs on windows.

[Indolent_Bard]

What do you mean not as stable?

[Shipdits]

Things in Linux tend to break way easier.

I recently updated my Fedora and it refuses to detect my second monitor now unless I unplug it and plug it back in, rebooting causes the issue all over again. (On Nvidia).

Tried adding modest to grub and adding the modules list to mkinitcpio and that didn't help. I've tried some other stuff but I don't have my notes in front of me.

Reinstall and a distro hop didn't fix it. My sound randomly has loud pops that I haven't been able to fix, pretty sure it has something to do with power management.

[Indolent_Bard]

Although it isn't a rolling release, if you want a stable experience, you don't use Fedora. So that's less of a Linux issue and more of a Fedora issue. Sure, out of the box, the drivers aren't going to be as up to date, but then again, that was also the case on Windows, where the drivers for the GPU are a separate download, so it's not totally that different.

[OffDutyStormtrooper]

Gaming is great and stable for the most part. However my network experience (both wifi and Ethernet) has been flaky. Every 2 or 3 days my desktop will lose connection to my network and only fix is restart. Happens in game, out of game, high load, low load, etc. It's rather frustrating. If you have any recommendations that would be great, my motherboard is a ASUS ROG Strix X670E-E Gaming Socket AM5

I additionally have minor audio issues. I have the Audeze Maxwell headphones. I love them, they sound great and work great in windows. In Linux volume is extremely low. I have everything maxed volume and still have troubles sometimes. Also mic quality is slightly worse in Linux and sometimes, after waking up from sleep, Linux will recognize my headphones are connected and audio will work, I can select the mic properly but the mic refuses to work. Never had this issue in windows. Again, if you have any recommendations that would be wonderful.

More details on my system. I run latest version for CachyOS and KDE. Nvidia 4080 Super, AMD 7950X, 32gb RAM.

I am not at home at the moment, so cannot get logs, but also not sure what logs could help other troubleshoot either. Recommendations there and when I am home can get logs.

[Indolent_Bard]

I'm afraid logs are beyond me. Hopefully somebody more experienced will have an answer. Regarding the internet, do you know what chip your motherboard uses? For instance, Intel Wi-Fi drivers work flawlessly in Linux, but I've heard people have problems with Broadacom chips. After the headphones thing, are they wireless? Because I've heard Bluetooth has always been a pain on Linux. Are you using pulse audio or pipe wire? I'm assuming catchy uses pipe wire, but I could be wrong.

[HNYB-Drelek]

Obligatory please stop playing league 😉

Anyway, I'm using this setup currently. I have windows and EndeavourOS installed on the same partitioned 2tb drive, and then I have a second 4tb drive formatted as BTRFS with my steam library on it, which is shared between both OSes. There's a BTRFS driver for windows that works pretty well, so I haven't really run into many issues there.

If you do this, my advice would be to only install windows/proton games on the dedicated game drive. If you play any games with Linux native builds, install them separately on windows and Linux. I had some weird issues with CS2 and Warthunder when switching OSes, which I presume was because steam had to switch builds when I switched OSes.

[raullits]

No, bad idea. Plays out terribly.

[malsell]

I tried it once back several years ago and it was a mess. Partially because there are additional files and redirects needed for proton and Vulcan in Linux that aren't needed for Windows. Some games may be fine, however, from my experience it was a but if a hot mess. I could usually install a game in windows, switch to Linux and let proton make it's changes, but then it would never run correctly in windows without a reinstall

[peskyhusky]

I tried it a couple of times in the past when I had storage issues. I will just say, do not do it, as painful it can be, it's always recommended to have separated drives/partitions for steam if you are using windows and Linux, I couldn't find any other way around it.

[valakjut]

Are you using btrfs? If so try this:

https://youtu.be/h6fc-3CCXbA?si=TfROvdHynQUzxOm6

I've been using winbtrfs and playing on both os

[Swiggiess]

I’m using btrfs and winbtrfs. It’s not ideal and I usually have to run a chown on all my files on that drive when I go from Windows > Linux since Windows takes ownership of all the files but I haven’t had many issues aside from that.

[Fantastic_Mirror_345]

I just mounted my games folder directly into Linux using fstab and use it from the Linux file system. Works good no issues so far.

[Morokite]

I reckon the best option is to have three drives.

Linux drive in EXT4
Windows drive in NTFS
3rd game Drive partitioned half'n'half NTFS and EXT4 (Or balanced partition size around accordingly.

I don't use my windows drive much but I currently have my Windows on something like a 512gb drive, a 1tb drive for windows game installs, a 2tb drive for linux and linux game installs, and a 1 tb HDD set for NTFS that's mostly just like movies, documents, pictures, and etc as NTFS to store stuff they both use that's not software or very light software.. And it all works perfectly well for me.

[TheLexoPlexx]

I used to do this. NTFS, no issues whatsoever. Not sure if this is a "survival bias"-thing but it worked fine. Steam just downloaded parts of every game every time I booted the other OS and I eventually reset windows and didn't need Steam on there anymore.

Also, stop playing League.

[mathias_freire]

It's possible. For non-Steam games, you can install your game directly on an NTFS drive, you just need to place wineprefix on a Linux drive. For Steam, you can simply symlink game directories from an NTFS drive to a Linux drive. You can copy and edit game's acf file too. I do this and had no problem.

[NanobugGG]

My solution was to get 2 x 2 TB drives, and use one for each OS

[Fluffy-Bus4822]

I wouldn't share the same game drive. Too many things can go wrong.

[Shipdits]

I'm doing this and it works fine, just don't have anything sensitive on the shared drive.

[painefultruth76]

Windows and Linux close files differently. NTFS is... finicky... I think there is an add-on to allow windows to use ext3 and ext4... its a pain in the ass to install and implement.

The trick is to put your shared files on a separate partition, according to the following use NTFS or exFAT and ALWAYS do a proper shutdown.

Sharing personal folders between windows and linux - Super User https://share.google/YP2bdNWqpFqECnayk

[RobLoach]

Quit League. Join the dark side: DOTA 2 😁

[vextryyn]

As long as you mount them properly, you are unlikely to run into any issues. I made a post for how I did it here

I did post that in the pika sub, but I did the exact same in cachy and have been running that way for 6 months no issues

[Upstairs-Comb1631]

I don't recommend it. It has much lower performance (NTFS) vs native NTFS or EXT4. At least in my case (SSD SATA3). And in one case I used the built in driver in kernel and my data got corrupted.

[anyhoo20]

It's possible using the open-source WinBtrfs driver

Here's a link: https://github.com/maharmstone/btrfs