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
This could very well be the anwser. there are in fact c: and z: in ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/0/pfx/dosdevices
although i couldn’t find an indicator that those are actually in use when launching a game through steam
They’re definitely both used. When a program is started in a Wine environment, those symlinks are the only way it can access the filesystem: game files in .../steamapps/ through z:; settings and saved games (normally in the Windows user’s home directory) through c:.
You can run wine explorer.exe to open a Windows Explorer implementation and check out what the Linux filesystem looks like in Windows. You can even add new lettered drives using winecfg, although I wouldn’t try it with Steam’s prefixes.
