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

  • SaltyIceteaMakerOP
    4•2 months ago

    Ah ok i think i get why it doesn’t work through the auto mount, but i still don’t understand why it works completely fine if i mount it through steam? What is different when steam mounts it?

    • @rtxnEnglish
      6•2 months ago

      I don’t know for sure, but I have an idea.

      By default, Steam creates wineprefixes in ~/.steam/steam/steamapps/compatdata/GAME_ID. This is located in the user home, which should be a Linux filesystem (ext4, btrfs, and similar). If the drive is mounted statically through fstab, the prefixes are created on the mounted drive. If the drive is mounted dynamically, Steam might think it’s a USB stick, likely with a FAT32 filesystem, and preemptively create the prefixes inside the user home to ensure compatibility.

      I’ll have to do some testing once I get home.

      • SaltyIceteaMakerOP
        2•2 months ago

        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

        • @rtxnEnglish
          1•2 months ago

          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/common 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.