Hello @loathingKernel, sharing Steam Libraries between OSes is not supported, but we'll see if a Steam dev has any interest in this request.
With 2023 nearing its end, more and more people are getting interested in trying Linux and most of them dual boot.
Having a clean way for them to share libraries between OSes and filesystems is crucial and this proposal seems like a good way to tackle this IMHO.
I hope we get this sometime in the near future
I support this feature, I don't want to "throw out" my NTFS partition where my Windows games are yet and a way to "force" compatdata to a specifc Linux drive/folder would be nice as it causes havoc/corruption on the NTFS drive otherwise.
(You can easily symlink the compatdata folder to the Linux drive but it just feels like a bad workaround to have something on the NTFS drive pointing to a Linux path. That's what I do now tho', due to lack of other options)
I also support this feature (or one of the similar suggested features). Multiple users should be able to play local shared games, seems the whole point of the Family Sharing feature.
I set STEAM_COMPAT_DATA_PATH=/home/[REDACTED]/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata and still compatdata directories are being created in the SteamLibrary of the game. They appear to contain only the save games. Could it be that Steam Cloud Save does not respect STEAM_COMPAT_DATA_PATH?
IMO this is related to how [#4820](https://github.com/ValveSoftware/steam-for-linux/issues/4820) should be resolved.
How is the desire for control over the location of the wine prefixes related to the stream client not starting?
Hello loathingKernel, sharing Steam Libraries between OSes is not supported, but we'll see if a Steam dev has any interest in this request.
This is an issue even with sharing a library on the same OS. Wine will refuse to run if the prefix is owned by another user, so having it fixed in the library makes sharing one library between two users on a Linux systems impossible. I guess they still can play Linux native games, but...
Sorry, I had too many bug tabs open and didn't notice I was trying to cross link to a PROTON issue https://github.com/ValveSoftware/Proton/issues/4820 Proton not working when multiple Linux users share a single installation path
STEAM_COMPAT_DATA_PATHx2 2024-09STEAM_COMPAT_DATA_PATH=/home/[REDACTED]/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata`x1 2024-09
Your system information
Please describe your issue in as much detail as possible:
When having multiple Steam libraries, such as shared libraries between the Linux and the Windows versions of Steam, the Proton prefixes reside in
the
compatdatadirectory relative to the library the game was installed in. This can cause issues in setups with multiple users, because they are sharingthe same prefix and thus settings, saves, etc, and also causes issues with NTFS partitions that can't handle the drive names Wine is using (running disk
repair on Windows deletes those files).
A nice solution to both of these issues would be adding an option to override
STEAM_COMPAT_DATA_PATHto point to thecompatdatadirectoryinside the Steam library under the Steam installation folder, i.e
$HOME/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/$SteamGameId.This way all prefixes are in one place, they are on a filesystem that can handle special names and they are user specific.
I wrote a patch that overrides
STEAM_COMPAT_DATA_PATHinside Proton by setting an env variable, and even though it worked (i.e. it found the existing Proton prefix inside the primary Steam library), thecompatdata/$SteamGameIdpath was still created relative to the Steam library of installation, although it remained empty.