With the advances in gaming on Linux in recent years, it is so tempting to switch full time. I would absolutely love to, but I am a Game Pass Ultimate subscriber and it is where I play a lot of my games on PC. I know you can use the cloud version, but I cannot stomach streaming games in their current state, so it is a no go. A large portion of my Steam library is compatible, but anytime I have done an install I end up giving in and going back to Windows for games.

  • oishiiburger
    2•11 months ago

    If you don’t mind doing it one at a time, and you’ve got a different drive besides the NTFS one (i.e. you’re not just looking to just reformat the NTFS volume), this currently works:

    • Format the new drive with whatever, likely Ext4 or Btrfs
    • Install Steam and make a fresh library on the new drive
    • Copy the contents of the NTFS steamapps/common into the new steamapps/common (or copy the individual folders of whatever games you don’t want to redownload).
    • Go into Steam, and act like you want to do a fresh install of whatever games you just copied over. Steam will act like it’s going to start from scratch, but you’ll get “discovering local files” before any downloads start.
    • Steam will either show the game as installed as-is or will update the delta to the current version.

    I use this method also for restoring backups of games to an SSD that live on a mechanical drive.