I’m having trouble getting Steam to open several games on my Kubuntu 24.10 setup. I’m dual-booting with Windows, and my games are all stored on the D drive, which is formatted as NTFS. I even followed a fix I found on GitHub for using NTFS with Linux and Windows, but many of my games still won’t launch. For instance, when I try to run ‘Risk of Rain 2’, I see errors in the Steam log related to wine and issues with kernel write watches. I’ve also tried forcing Proton to use OpenGL, but that just leads to more errors about not being able to open Steam’s executable. I can’t find a clear solution online, and I’m starting to think about going back to Windows for gaming. Any ideas on what could be causing this?
2 Answers
Using NTFS drives for gaming on Linux can be tricky. It’s recommended to use an ext4 or btrfs filesystem instead, as these are more compatible with Linux. Games may have issues accessing data on NTFS, so consider moving your games to a Linux-formatted partition if possible.
It sounds like Steam might be trying to write the Proton prefix to your NTFS drive, but that usually works best on ext4. Try checking the “STEAM_COMPAT_DATA_PATH” environment variable to see if that helps with launching your games.
Yeah, I’ve experienced similar issues before. Changing to ext4 made a huge difference in game performance for me!