I would like some help with playing pirated and steam games on Linux. I am comfortable with Linux bit not a super god and English is not my best.
I have a duelboot with Linux on a small 125 gb sata SSD and Windows on a 1TB NVMe SSD. I have my games installed on a separate 2tb HDD (NTFS) and this works fine on Windows. But I want to play the same games that I have already installed on my HDD. All the games is installed using Windows. When using lutris I get a lot of “can’t create file” errors but I can create files in the filemaneger in linux so I have read-write.
I have tried to search online and some say that heroic game launcher is better but that one spits out “program got a serious problem” error.
I use Pop 22.04 jammy AMD Ryzen 7 5700G with Radeon Graphics @ 16x 3.8GHz NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 16GB ram
i have tried Lutris and heroic. i got Age of mythology retold to launch but not read dead redemtion 2.
if you guys need more just ask, i am quite new to linux gaming :D
I can post logs in a moment but really happy if someone can help out a bit.
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Yeah, the games you want to play on Linux, you should install those to a drive formatted with ext4, btrfs, or done other Linux native filesystem. Specifically you will run into issues using things like Lutris because setup scripts largely assume this to be the case and make use of things like soft or hard links.
And while ntfs has similar functionality like junction, the standard Linux tool to create links
lnand other basic commands likecpdon’t work with ntfs (afaik Windows still doesn’t even expose that functionality from ntfs) and you’ll see errors similar to what you described, either looking like a permissions error (eg unable to create) or depending on the tool you may get a more specific error.I have less experience with Heroic but if you want something close to turnkey Linux gaming of Windows titles a Linux filesystem is non negotiable unless you feel like debugging things any time sometime doesn’t work. From my experience with Lutris that’s not the only reason you’ll see issues either and your ability to diagnose and resolve those as they come up will be a factor.
You should also get familiar with wine and specifically valce’s proton, figure out the command line invocation that will launch a title through proton like steam does since i imagine you aren’t running these through the steam client. Finally look into proton-ge (glorious eggroll) which i use almost exclusively for Windows gaming on Linux.
Also learn what a wine prefix is and strongly consider using a different prefix for each game. Its just folders and for transparency you’ll have redundant files across them, but it lets you have different sets of dependencies for each title. So like one game you might need mono (open source c#) but another you might need actual C# and have wine also handle running that. This is a case where installing both might make neither game playable if both games and both dependencies are in the same prefix.
The biggest issues you’ll run into that you may not be able to resolve with any Linux gaming setup that is running Windows software is anti-cheat. Epic’s EAC can work for some titles, I’ve seen steam deck specific instructions, but my game library is single player heavy so i rarely am challenged by these. Steam Deck adoption has helped there but it’s still slow going.
I have Baldurs Gate 3 and BG3 Mod Manager all Windows native running through steam and proton on my Debian tower, just to underscore the success of this approach
tl;dr use a file system that supports hard and soft (symbolic links), use proton-ge and a separate wine prefix for each game
Quick clarification, you can use cp on a ntfs drive, but try to cp a symlink from ext4 to ntfs does not work, that’s what i meant
I’d suggest Bottles for managing wine environments
Windows writ locks NTFS drives, it’s a hibernation glitch, to fix:
- Unmount the NTFS drive
- in terminal run
sudo ntfsfix /dev/DRIVENAME - remount the drive
A lot of Linux distros have ntfsfix installed but you may have to add it yourself via apt, dnf, or yum depending on your distro
https://superuser.com/questions/1394263/ntfs-file-system-read-only-by-ubuntu-remount-doesnt-work
It’s not actually a glitch, it’s Windows’s Fast Startup feature. It sort of hibernates the system rather than shutting it off. The running state of the system is partially retained and the drives aren’t cleanly unmounted. I don’t know anything about ntfsfix personally, but it probably cleans this up just fine. If you’re gonna be spending a large amount of time using Linux, however, you’re probably better off disabling fast startup altogether. If you only use Linux a little, though, I think holding shift while you shut down also forces a full shutdown.
Yeah I say glitch because there are reports that, despite disabling it, and fully shutting down your PC, it still doesn’t release the lock, it does that for me. I guess really I should call it intentional malware.
You can also permanently disable it from the Windows side (at least in Windows 10).
install the games in linux or the paths will be wrong. there’s no way around this. it’s like moving a program’s directory to another computer; it may have scattered files everywhere that it needs.
I find using Windows to install (on a third, shared drive) easier so YMMV.
This is what I whants to do also. I have 3 drives Linux, window and games
I have installed all the games with windows and now I can’t start atleast red dead from dodi.
I use Bottles, which mostly works out of the box. Sometimes a game will require some fiddling though. I’ve used Lutris, Heroic and plain Wine, but Bottles works best for me on Fedora Silverblue.
Thx I will try getting used to things and see what is best solution for me😊
I recently switched to Linux as my daily driver and had this same issue. Unfortunately you have to download through the Linux steam client you can’t run any games previously installed through windows.
I ended up corrupting my windows game drive trying to force it.
You can, you just need to make sure you run ntfsfix to remove the write hold windows puts on NTFS drives. See my other comment
Appreciate you taking the time to share a technical fix, but I figured I had a spare drive an unlimited fibre plan so path of least resistance won.
AFAIK the NTFS hold doesn’t help with trying to share a Steam install folder anyway, and Valve recommends not trying to share a single directory like that.
I understand the urge to save drive space, been there myself, but there’s no clean way to do it unfortunately. Keep your installs separate (drives for OS, but partition is fine for games).
I would recommend either launching through steam (add external program) and when you understand how that works switch over to umu-launcher.
Obviously they need to be either self contained or installed while running from your linux machine.
thx for the replies! the fix from @candyman337@sh.itjust.works did not fix my problem :/
as for the other replies do you guys mean i need to install the games i want to run on linux with linux on my HDD and games i run on windows with windows on the same HDD?
don’t mix them, is my advice. keep them separate and you won’t have issues.
But it should not be a problem to install them in a separate folder on the HDD?
if the drive is using a non-native filesystem like ntfs, you’re going to keep having problems. a secondary partition is recommended.
Thx for the advise😊
I just installed the ntfs3g package and it was straight forward. Never faced any error.
Did you install the games on Windows? Have you tried AAA games? How did you run the games? Bottles, lutris, steam, heroic etc?
Lutris. There’s some sym linking to do i forgot. Best to do what others are suggesting.
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