Valve Publishes New Steam Deck FAQ With A Few New Details Shared

[bple2137]

Did you go into the Steam Library settings and point that towards the Library on that volume? Adding removable drives there usually works for me and all my games just pop-up. You have to treat it like a fixed disk until you remove it from the Steam Library....don't remove it from your PC until you remove it from Steam.

Yes, I added new library path in Steam settings and I choosed that while installing game

[skeevy420]

You can share the drive with Windows and use NTFS on it IF Steam will change its behavior to store compdata always on the main system drive. Recently I tried to do just that (install a game on external NTFS storage) and the game couldn't lunch at all until I made a symlink so that compdata was on Linux FS. Then the game run without any problem.

Did you go into the Steam Library settings and point that towards the Library on that volume? Adding removable drives there usually works for me and all my games just pop-up. You have to treat it like a fixed disk until you remove it from the Steam Library....don't remove it from your PC until you remove it from Steam.

[skeevy420]

WSL on Windows uses EXT4 or something I think? I believe there's been an EXT4 driver for Windows available for some time too. While I'm with you with wanting to see BTRFS/ZFS get official support/adoption on Windows more than EXT4, it'd probably be EXT4 before either of those.

I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft and Valve would work together to get EXT4 going, but then again we have NTFS upstreaming into the kernel, so perhaps that'd get pushed more as compatibility between the two OS with SteamDeck?

For internal storage instead of external, I imagine like mobile devices with microSD storage, it might be available via USB connection to the OS that way. I think that requires some not so great protocol for Android devices (MTP?), but abstracts the filesystem part. Some manufacturers just provide an app for Windows and macOS users which I often found to work much more reliably and perform better than the alternative Linux would use.

Technically speaking, with WSL(2) you can use any file system including ZFS. It's just a VM and you can pass through anything from Linux to Windows from WSL.

While there is Ext4 work on Windows, personally, I don't see the point when we could have better crossplatform BTRFS or ZFS. Both of those have fast file codecs like LZ4 or Zstd as well as deduplication technology built-in so they'll assist in saving space from all the Proton prefixes and more.

I used to be better with Android. Thank goodness I've almost smoked enough pot to forget how Android does Android.

[Nille]

WSL on Windows uses EXT4 or something I think? I believe there's been an EXT4 driver for Windows available for some time too.

WSL2 is a VM with a running Linux Kernel. You can passthrough the storage and mount it on windows if you like. you can also do this with any other VM. But there are also IFS Drivers for windows that you could try. Paragon sells a driver for that (~20€). Or you can use free software to explore the drive like Ext2explore.

https://www.diskinternals.com/linux-reader/

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But about the fs. I hoped you could use exfat or UDF for portability.

[polarathene]

No need for a special filesystem. Plumb idmapped mounts into however the desktop environment mounts removable drives, and you can have effective ownerlessness on any FS.

Not any FS? BTRFS only recently got support IIRC, and OverlayFS is up next. I believe EXT4 and XFS have support atm, not sure about F2FS or others.

[polarathene]

People wanting to share a volume with their Deck and their PC. Until there's an Arch Linux based Steam Machine 2.0 or they release their OS to the wild it is very safe to assume that most people will have a Windows 7/10/11 PC that doesn't support Ext4. People here using Linux or dual-booting are the minority.

WSL on Windows uses EXT4 or something I think? I believe there's been an EXT4 driver for Windows available for some time too. While I'm with you with wanting to see BTRFS/ZFS get official support/adoption on Windows more than EXT4, it'd probably be EXT4 before either of those.

I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft and Valve would work together to get EXT4 going, but then again we have NTFS upstreaming into the kernel, so perhaps that'd get pushed more as compatibility between the two OS with SteamDeck?

For internal storage instead of external, I imagine like mobile devices with microSD storage, it might be available via USB connection to the OS that way. I think that requires some not so great protocol for Android devices (MTP?), but abstracts the filesystem part. Some manufacturers just provide an app for Windows and macOS users which I often found to work much more reliably and perform better than the alternative Linux would use.

[Michael_S]

I actually had a conversation explaining that the statements from a Valve Developer obviously were a generalization -- and not meant to be taken literally as "every game on steam" -- citing that no reasonable person would expect the Steam Deck to run their high-res high frame-rate VR-only games.

Someone replied that they "expected Steam Deck to do VR from their statement" I facepalmed and moved on.

Not everyone that uses Steam is a tech enthusiast. Most, sure, but not all. So that needs to be in all of the SteamDeck promotional materials so that casual gamers among the early adopters don't get burned.

I'm not much of a gamer these days, but I'm hopeful that Valve's push on this product is what gets Linux gaming truly into the mainstream - and by extension, Linux for home users in general.

I'm also interested to see how it would work as a streaming device. Since it's got a full Linux distro and Bluetooth, presumably I could use it for Kodi and then use a browser on it for Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max, and so forth. Obviously $400 for a streaming gadget is way too much, but I got a Playstation 4 for streaming 5 years ago and I also use it for streaming.

[bple2137]

People wanting to share a volume with their Deck and their PC. Until there's an Arch Linux based Steam Machine 2.0 or they release their OS to the wild it is very safe to assume that most people will have a Windows 7/10/11 PC that doesn't support Ext4. People here using Linux or dual-booting are the minority.

Don't get me wrong, I totally agree with the sentiment. Anything to get the world off of MS reliant solutions is a blessing.

In reality, however, I think they need to prompt the user between BTRFS and NTFS since Linux supports both. NTFS if you need Windows support and BTRFS if you don't....or just BTRFS, throw some devs onto WinBTRFS, and make it part of Steam. They could do the same thing with ZFS or Ext4...but ZFS or BTRFS would be the better long-term choices in regards to features available, performance tuning, making backups, and already having cross platform projects running to piggy-back off of and/or hire/contract its dev.

You can share the drive with Windows and use NTFS on it IF Steam will change its behavior to store compdata always on the main system drive. Recently I tried to do just that (install a game on external NTFS storage) and the game couldn't lunch at all until I made a symlink so that compdata was on Linux FS. Then the game run without any problem.

[skeevy420]

You will be able to format it using whatever FS you like, it defaults to EXT4 because it is a Linux box and that's more or less what most people use in Linux.

I for one I'm delighted, I can't stand FAT/NTFS and promoting anything else is great, I understand why the entire industry always dances around MS's tune, but there is no need in this case.

Can't wait to get my hands on a SteamDeck, I'm genuinely excited for a device for the first time in years.

People wanting to share a volume with their Deck and their PC. Until there's an Arch Linux based Steam Machine 2.0 or they release their OS to the wild it is very safe to assume that most people will have a Windows 7/10/11 PC that doesn't support Ext4. People here using Linux or dual-booting are the minority.

Don't get me wrong, I totally agree with the sentiment. Anything to get the world off of MS reliant solutions is a blessing.

In reality, however, I think they need to prompt the user between BTRFS and NTFS since Linux supports both. NTFS if you need Windows support and BTRFS if you don't....or just BTRFS, throw some devs onto WinBTRFS, and make it part of Steam. They could do the same thing with ZFS or Ext4...but ZFS or BTRFS would be the better long-term choices in regards to features available, performance tuning, making backups, and already having cross platform projects running to piggy-back off of and/or hire/contract its dev.

[uid313]

I hope that Proton improvements can be quick to reach back into mainline Wine.