don't share steam installations between linux and windows. It's in the readme for this very reason as it causes corruption.
I don't believe he's using shared libraries; I think he's encountering a bug I'm dealing with where it forces me to re-validate files of different installations, even if they're on different machines. For example, when I go home and log in to my windows installation, I'm probably going to have to validate splice because I played it on my netbook (this computer).
That's what I'm figuring. If he could clarify, that'd be most helpful.
I've encountered the same issue. I have both win and ubuntu and separated steam installations. After playing TF2 on linux and trying then to play it on windows, steam forced validation of tf2 files. There was no update, steam was closed properly last time, games and steam itself are installed on different partitions. No idea what could cause that.
That's what I experience. For me, I exclude TF2 in that because, frankly, TF2 does that to me on either system. I have to validate every other time I start the game after a shutdown.
I think this issue is still present for me on Windows 10 Anniversary and Ubuntu 16.10. Switching between Linux and Windows requires me to update the games that I updated on the other one, so I could play them there.
Can someone please retest that this is an issue and that there are no shared folders involved?
This issue needs some hint of how the two installs of steam are interacting with each other to cause the corruption.
Could you clarify what you mean by shared folders?
My installations of Steam are separate on both Windows and Ubuntu, but they share a library folder, that I have located on another drive. Doing it this way in theory should allow the games to share platform-agnostic content and avoid me needing to have completely separate game installations for Windows and Ubuntu (which would effectively duplicate the game files). Unfortunately this doesn't quite work and switching between Windows and Ubuntu requires me to re-download certain portions of games. For example, having Rocket League fully updated while on my Windows installation and then switching to Ubuntu, will require me to download about 3GB. After fully updating it on the Ubuntu installation and switching back to Windows will require me to download about 5GB.
Currently I try avoid updating and playing the games on my Ubuntu installation, as it would require me to update them once I'm back on Windows.
As noted by @johndrinkwater, shared library folders deleting game files for other OSes was tracked at #546.
Provided you handle any permission issues, you can use game files from an existing steamapps folder to avoid downloading the OS independent content again. However, as you wrote, this will lead some content being removed that is not intended for the currently running OS.
It is at the discretion of each game dev to decide how much content is OS independent, or if they want to make their players download OS-specific content that is not expected to work on the current running system. This is not expected to change in the near future.
Nothing extracted yet.
Mostsly these are only 1-100 mb updates per game, but sometimes I got message that executable file is corrupted and have to download whole game once again. As long as I update game and play on one OS, it's ok. When only I switch to the other, I get corrupted files and have to update.
OSes:
Ubuntu 12.10
Windows 8