I am dual booting Leap 42.1 with Windows 10. Steam is installed on a separate hard drive that is NTFS formatted. I have the drive mounted with execute permissions, so I can see all my Linux-viable games installed in Steam when I launch it in openSUSE.
However, every time I launch it, it starts updating all the installed games (an example is Rocket League, where it tries to get a 3.3 GB update, which seems to me more like the size for the entire game and not an update). When I boot into Windows and load up Steam however, I can see that there are no updates for these games and I can launch them straight away.
The clue: NTFS. Linux can’t write permissions etc. to NTFS. To test this, move one of your games to a native linux filesystem and see that the issue won’t arise.
Ok I’ve been trying to sort this issue out but still running into roadblocks.
My solution has been to format a spare HDD I have with ext4 to use as a games partition for playing games under Linux.
First problem is that I cannot get Steam to forget or remove the previously mentioned NTFS partition (which has a bunch of games already installed on it - the reason Steam is giving for not being able to remove it). Fair enough, so I’ve tried uninstalling Steam and deleting all .steam* folders under /home/, but still when I reinstall Steam it is automatically adding the NTFS partition library. I’ve tried scanning the whole file system for any other folders with the prefix “steam” but no joy. Any way to get Steam to forget previous settings?
The other issue I have is that I don’t have experience with adding an ext4 partition in oS and it seems I don’t have write permissions. The fstab entry looks like this currently (I realise it is empty, but not really sure what to add or if oS offers the option to populate it with sensible defaults):
Ok so I’ve managed to solve this on my own but thought I’d post the solution in case anyone else has the same issue.
The first issue with making Steam forget previous settings was done with the command “steam --reset” - note: I believe this will remove all installed games if you do choose to run it. In my case I just unmounted the NTFS partition so it couldn’t touch it.
The second issue was that I did not have the “exec” tag in the fstab for the ext4 drive - I had previously thought this was only for NTFS drives. I had also tried chown’ing the drive and using Dolphin to change permissions but neither worked - I still had to add exec.