Moving Steam Installation
I'm new to Linux as a whole, coming from just Windows, so I am still learning what is safe to do with the os.
My overall goal is figuring out how to mod both steam and non-steam games, and have that all being done on a dedicated drive separate from the bazzite installation drive. Setting up the steam and non-steam libraries was easy so I've moved to figuring out modding.
So far the tools I've found (MO2/Vortex through Steam Proton or Bottles) requires the mod manager to install in a prefix, which is in the Steam installation which in the Home directory. As I understand it, the Home directory is on the bazzite installation drive. Is there any danger in just moving Steam to my other drive? Do I just need to manually tell Steam where it's been moved to, and reset my launch icons? Is there some tool in bazzite for relocating preinstalled apps?
While I'm here, is there any difference between moving Steam and moving a flatpak like Heroic? Which is what I'm using for non-steam games.
8 Replies
You can add the dedicated game drive to Steam. It will make a SteamLibrary folder and then inside of Steam you can move the games in Steam Settings >> Storage. Note that the different drive has to be formatted with BTRFS or EXT4 for Proton to work properly with the drive on Linux. If you move the games manually Steam will probably pick up that the folders were moved but if you move it in Steam it knows about it and you won't any weird launch issues.
For Heroic, you'll need to open Flatseal and adjust the file system settings so that flatpak Heroic has access to the seperate drive. I think you can just change the default heroic folder and move the files but not 100% sure on that.
I don't want to just have a dedicated game library drive for steam. I've already figured out about BTRFS for Proton games. To reiterate, I'm not looking to moving the Steam game library, I'm looking to move the Valve program called Steam. I don't know if that breaks anything and if it does then if it's easily fixable.
The issue is when installing a mod manager to steam, or with bottles, the prefix is created within the Steam installation and not in any game library. This is an issue because the mods and mod manager need to be on the same drive to function and I do not want inflate the storage of my Home directory with mods.
I guess that you could probably move the entire Steam folder and make a symbolic link to it on your home folder. That might work.
why symlink isn't this something Steam supports?
i recall seeing a prompt to point Steam towards the installation under certain conditions
i think it happened when i deleted
~/.local/share/Steam
but not ~/.steamIn Windows you can easily install steam to a different location... not sure about Linux.
I could learn how symlink works and try that
Don't symlink to an NTFS location though.
I already encountered and resolved the NTFS issue before any of this. I know Proton needs BTRFS or ext4 and I can run vanilla games while consulting ProtonDB, so that's no issue.
It took me a while to find the time to figure it out with some youtube tutorials that didn't assume I knew more than I do. But I did get it a symlink to work for the Steam installation folder, and installing Vortex through Steam put it into a prefix inside of the new location on my preferred drive. So I believe it's worked
Although now I can't right lcick and quit out of it in the taskbar