Phanlix

The USB drive was formatted as ext4. It was my steam library on windows, I figured having the native file system for a drive that's exclusively going to be used to run linux games was a good idea.

There's infinity between should and does sometimes.

So it was already ext4.

I ended up manually running the steam console as described here. Still wasn't able to use the gui to add a drive but I was able to use the console command to do it manually. Then I restarted to make sure everything was working. On starting steam again it was gone! So I full exited steam and opened console again, and somehow it was there! So I set the option under settings to start on boot thinking that it'd run the console edition again on boot and I could live with that.

Well it turns out somehow there are now 2 steam installs on my computer. I'm not gonna touch it since it's working, but my working theory is somehow running the console created a second steam on my pc. It did act like it was doing a full install the first time I booted on command line. Weird. But like I said it's working now. I may poke at it later and see if I can uninstall the redundant one, but I kinda don't wanna poke it.

Christ, I'm sure I'll care more about that sort of thing if I do get more into this. I know there's a firmware replacement for my asus router that's supposed to give better file sharing options, but I'm sketchy about firmware updates. I've had a few go bad over my lifetime and I don't want to replace a router that's that expensive right now.

So... I just fixed my external hdd issue, in the weirdest way possible.

I found how to access steam console here. It also had a line for manually adding a mounted drive through the console. That worked fine. Then I restarted and reopened steam and the drive wasn't there. So I exited and opened steam console again, and boom there it was. So I went into settings and told the steam console version to start on boot and that actually worked.

Looking at my apps though, searching for steam, there appear to be 2 separate installed versions of steam. Idk how that happened I'm very sure I only installed it once. I think somehow running the steam console literally created a second version of steam somehow. Idk though. It's working now so I'm not gonna analyze it too much.

... gonna be honest, not really.

SMB1 is an issue I had to solve in windows too, but that was way easier because all you had to do was enable the package and you were good. This issue of using my external hdd and the driver issues with Nvidia I had with the other distros was just an unpleasant experience all around. The linux experience so far is it takes me hours to do things that it takes me minutes to do in Windows, and issues that were never issues in Windows are issues here.

For example. I have a 55in TV as my secondary monitor. I usually on windows turn up the scaling on that monitor. On linux it doesn't appear that that's possible as the scaling is linked across all screens.

I can work with it for now, but frankly that and other issues are starting to add up and make me yearn for the comfort of a familiar OS. I promised myself I'd do this for a week to see if Linux really is viable to me as an OS though because I'm not pleased about the direction MS is going.

The goal still is to game on Linux, day 2 has passed and I'm closer to being ready to install games.

Day 3 will be spent figuring out how to get that damn USB drive on steam as a secondary install location.

Any tips would be appreciated. I've chmod 777'd the mounted drive. And I was able to add it via steam console manually, but it didn't save unfortunately and reset everything after I exited steam.

EDIT: Got it, there are other comments where I linked how within this thread.

Thanks lol, stream is working great too, much better than Fedora. Way less choppy and it doesn't crash when you seek on VLC, so Pop!OS is clearly the superior distro here.

I do need to figure out the login eventually. I need read/write access and as anon I can't write, but I'll come back to that. I'm getting a ton of stuff set up now.

Holy crap I got it to work. smbv1 is not enabled by default on Linux.

Once I went through the tutorial and added

client min protocol = NT1 server min protocol = NT1

to smb.conf, it worked and I could connect!

Sadly it still wouldn't accept my username and password, but I set it to allow anon login and that's working 100% right now. So... just need to figure out why it won't accept username and password. Moment of truth comes when I test VLC again too.

I don't care about your video, like at all.

All I care about is mapping a network drive. If I can't do that Linux is useless to me. I've jumped to PopOS, which out of the gate is working better than Fedora did, but I still CANNOT access my network drive. I'm downloading windows again as we speak, this is a nightmare.

I'm probably going to end back up on windows.

Did download PopOS though, it already beats the hell out of Fedora because off the rip Nvidia just works.

However I still cannot connect to my network drive. I can see it fine in +other locations, but when I open it it says "unable to access location: failed to mount windows share: software caused connection abort"

Okay so I've done some detailed responses elsewhere.

Other network places shows it maybe1/3 of the time. It throws an error when trying to open it.

smb://file.server/share_name does not work. It also throws its own unique error.

So I can't get smb to work at all. I know it is working because I'm also testing it on a Mac. For some reason Linux will just not work.

Lol it didn't work.

I'm done. Linux is trash. Can't even do something out of the box that windows has been doing since windows 2000.

I can get this working on Mac, windows and android. Linux has no excuses

Funny enough I've been googling for hours and came across half a dozen tutorials on this and none have worked I'll let you know if this does