this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2023
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year 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.