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Close to switching to a Linux distro full time. (beehaw.org)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.