this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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Well I tried. Sharing the same drive between Windows and Linux is a big no-no. It's just not a thing Windows is designed to be able to do.
Right. The issues is if you spend any time looking for an option to share a drive across OSs every answer online is to "just use NTFS, it's good now". It isn't, really, but I also tried moving one of my drives to ExFAT to see if that was any better and... it kinda wasn't. Same exact set of foibles.
The real annoyance, beyond Steam being just buggy about library management compared to Heroic, is how Linux wants to treat any drive like an external drive unless it's part of the original install. Gotta say, I like how drive mounting works on Windows far better for desktop use.
The hell is it! MOST topics about using NTFS with Steam on Linux is do not use NTFS. I have no idea where you got that info from.
Just... why? Granted exFAT is more open than NTFS (did they completely open it, can't remember, too lazy to check), but it's also very lacking compared to other filesystems. It's really just meant as a filesystem for removable media. Something that just about every system is capable of reading and writing to. Like a bare minimum amount of features all OSes can work with.
If you really want to try this unholy union of a setup, maybe installing an open source filesystem onto Windows would work (very slightly) better.
Now I'm in no way promising that this will work. Windows does a lot of crap at the I/I layer that complicates things, so you might still have issues. But I think it has a better chance than what you've already tried.
@[email protected]
there is one company (paragon software) that sells ext2/3/4 (full access) and btrfs/xfs (read access only) drivers for windows, which worked pretty good for me, and they have a demo version for 7 days. price for consumer licences are about 30€. i didn't try putting my steam library there tho, so your milage may vary.
But i would recommend what i did a few monhst ago: after 3 days with nobara 40 i just deleted my windows and the few programs that don't work under linux now live in a VM; my mouse/keyboard software for creating macros only works under windows, but the profiles themselves are stored on the devices so they still work under linux.
I just love the BTRFS features like deduplication - its great for modding large games, saves huge amounts of disk space, and the merging of disks into a single drive in raid0 configuration is super easy and has great performance. NTFS feels just slow and sluggish in comparison.
Now that's a use case I hadn't considered!
yeah, and you always can fall back to your clean, untouched installation :-)