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Weird stuff with steam, proton, and filesystems (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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So, I discovered weird behavior when trying to play games on an NTFS file system in Linux.

When i auto mount the drive through a fstab entry, it is only able to launch Linux native games (I think I read somewhere that this is a permission issue).

However, if I mount it through steams "select a drive" option, it works without a problem (so far at least).

I assume this is again a permission issue, as when I mount the drive through steam, I get a Polkit password prompt.

Anyone got a clue what's going on, and/or maybe a way to make the auto mount work, so I don't have to manually mount it after every boot?

Distro:

Arch

Kernel (according to neofetch):

6.11.1-zen1-1-zen

NTFS driver:

ntfs-3g

Proton version:

GE-Proton9-10

tested games:

Terraria (Tmodloader)
Project Wingman
Hades II

fstab entry:

#/dev/nvme1n1p1

UUID=E01A2CEC1A2CC180 /mnt/games ntfs nofail 0 3

full system update a few hours ago

date for future visitors (dd.mm.yyyy):

01.10.2024 at 14:44 (02:44 pm)

edit: formatting and adding proton version

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

NTFS doesn’t support symlinks

It does. You can create them on Windows using the mklink command. It creates a file link if no switch is passed, directory link with /D, directory junction (different thing) with /J, and hardlink with /H. The ntfs-3g driver has complete support for links.

Some Windows programs, like the Scoop package manager, make extensive use of symlinks and directory junctions.

[–] muhyb 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Huh, interesting. Didn't know about mklink. So with this, can Steam games be used from NTFS directory?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Not really, because some files in the wineprefix will have invalid names.

When an NTFS volume is mounted, it implicitly uses the windows_names option, which restricts the character set that can be used in filenames, in order to preserve compatibility with Windows. The specific character in question is the colon -- it is permitted by NTFS, but it's a reserved character in Windows, which means it is also restricted by the windows_names mount option. This prevents Wine from creating its c: and z: symlinks, which are required for Wine to operate.

You could try some symlink fuckery, like linking .../steamapps/common to the NTFS drive, since all of the problematic files are located outside of that, in .../steamapps/compatdata. Or you could mount the NTFS volume directly to the common directory. If you do, I'd love to hear the results.

Relevant issue: https://github.com/storaged-project/udisks/issues/713

[–] muhyb 1 points 1 month ago

That makes sense. Thanks for the detailed reply.

Though you could ask this to OP, they might try it. Personally I don't use NTFS even on my external HDDs.