I’ve backed up many of the Steam games I had installed in Windows. Am I able to use these on Linux or do I need to re-download them?
I’ve backed up many of the Steam games I had installed in Windows. Am I able to use these on Linux or do I need to re-download them?
For proton games, yes. I still have some games in my old windows installation and they work just fine.
If you manually set your games to use proton, that will work for all of them. For the ones that have a native linux version, steam will detect that you have the windows version and download the extra files needed for the linux version automatically.
My uncertainty with copying a Windows install over to Linux has to do with proton/wine prefixes. From my understanding, when installing a game using proton it gets its own prefix installed along with it.
How does that work when copying a game over and adding a non-steam game to Steam? Does adding the exe to Steam create the prefix automatically?
The prefix is created on first run. The game files do not reside in the prefix.
Yes, steam will create a prefix for any game or exe that you add when you first launch it. That’s why the first launch always takes a minute or two.
The same exe can be used by windows and proton, so having a dual-boot setup with all games on the windows partition is feasible.
But there’s one very important thing about that: Turn off fast boot in windows before mounting the drive in linux, otherwise you will have to wait hours when booting windows the next time (which can’t be cancelled because microsoft).
Thanks!