this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2025
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Linux Gaming
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You would need to reinstall your games on Linux, to answer your question. Steam and Heroic Games Launcher make this process quite painless, but yeah, still gotta do it. NTFS supports ignoring upper/lowercase, whereas Linux (and other Unix-y systems) do not, at least by default. This can cause all kinds of weird issues down the line.
Now that said, one thing you could do is make a new steam library on Windows to a drive or partition formatted as ExFAT, then use Steam on Windows to transfer your games to that new library. If you did that, I think you could simply add that steam library to your instance of steam running on Linux Mint. Combined with setting steam to use Proton for any Windows game (it's just one checkbox to do so), I think maybe you'd be in business.
Hosting the games on NTFS and loading them into Steam from there under Linux is possible. It is inconsistent and a hasssle, though.
I will say the setup the OP suggests is totally doable, but when I've had it that way it turned out to be easier to just do everything else on Windows than to flip back and forth, so after I updated some hardware I haven't been on a hurry to set up Linux again.
I'd say it's more convenient to do this long term if you have two PCs. Maybe a laptop for Linux work and a desktop with a powerful GPU for gaming. Being able to have both on sleep and quickly switching back and forth is less likely to make you (well, me, at least) lazy than having to reboot each time.
I mean, personally I do all of my gaming on Linux and fully removed Windows from my gaming desktop in 2022 and haven't looked back. My VR headset is a Vive, so it works just fine with SteamVR on Linux, no additional issues there, even while using Proton.
I was just thinking exFAT would work more consistently for a steam library under Linux than NTFS and it would also not introduce any issues on Windows.
You'd think, but at least in my Manjaro install I had the exact same, if not a bit worse, of an experience trying to share an exFAT drive than a NTFS drive. I don't recommend it either way.
I definitely play enough games without full Linux support that I wouldn't have switched fully, even if I didn't need Windows for work. The anticheat issues are one thing, but with a high end Nvidia card I found a bunch of proprietary features either didn't work or underperformed compared to Windows. Mix that with a HDR, VRR display and it was a bit of a mess.
Linux was snappier for desktop office work most of the time, though.
I hear with the release of GNOME 48, full HDR support is now implemented, for what that's worth. But yeah, totally get it, you want every ounce of power from your hardware.
I went all AMD, so for my system it's working great.
I heard they finally have official support. How well it works I don't know. I haven't tested it yet.
I think the assumption that people are going to have AMD hardware is a bit of an issue with this argument. Even with their current gen success they are under 10% of the market. That's all good for committed Linux users who built their PCs with Linux compatibility in mind, but 90% of the desktop market (for gaming at least) is going to be repurposing a Windows device with a dedicated Nvidia GPU.
Luckily I've always been all AMD! But yeah multi-player games are where it kind of sucks for linux. I plan to try it out on my extra hard drive. I know cs2 will work at least ! Game devs need to stop it with kernel level anti cheat trash.
I don't know how you fix that problem, but I'll admit that you do need some functional anti-cheat. Nobody wants to go back to the days of PC gaming being the wild west while consoles were nice and secure.
I wonder if in a world less focused on Windows some multiplayer games would just work on some secure container type of thing, or just have most of the gameplay run on server or something. There are definitely other solutions that wouldn't rely on the Windows-specific crutches of the current implementations.