Day 2 - I feel lost #LinuxChallenge

Wednesday 8 Jan 2025

For the second day I had two simple goals in mind. Set up Godot so I can continue working on the game I am helping with (I hope I will be able to share something soon) and make one game playable. That was something I had huge issues with yesterday.

Godot setup was very easy. To be fair, the most time I spend on this was finding an app for Git.

On the other hand the Steam situation took me several hours. First of all was to check if I have some driver issue, I did this by downloading a game that have a native Linux version. I choosed RimWorld, one of my most favourite games of all time and it launched without any issues. This told me that there is issue either with Proton compatibility layer or with disk access. Firstly I tried the Proton way, I wanted to make Nine Sols functional and a lot of people on ProtonDB seemed to preffer some kind of custom Proton version called GE-Proton so I went to download it. The instalation process looked easy enough, just unzip the .tar.gz archive into a specific Steam folder and then restart Steam, what could go wrong?

Struggle with Linux folder system

Task sounds easy, take the archive and extract it, let's get to it.

Extract the release tarball into ~/.steam/root/compatibilitytools.d/

Ok, I selected the little magnifying glass to search for a folder and... nothing! No problem, maybe I misunderstood the file path, the little wave must mean the drive I have Steam installed on, so they just did not put the drive letter there. I know I made my Linux installation on drive with letter C in windows, I though that Linux also use C as a default system drive letter. Still nothing and I started diging deeper. There is an app called Disks and believe it or not, there are all drives detected and non of them had any visible letter or identifier that would mean anything to me.

I opened again the Files app and started looking for it there and this is probably my Windows brain but when I looked at this window, I was thinking that I am just missing something big. Linux should be the system that gives you access to everything, why is there only 9 folders?

After some time just clicking through the empty system folders I got to the "Other Locations" tab, I would like to know WHY the drives are accessible through "other locations" tab and not through a single click button that would put me to the root folder of the drive! And you even cannot pin it to the side bar! JUST WHY!?

Anyway, I opened the system drive and... I am scared. There was just SO MANY 3 letter folders, each containing more 3 letter folders with names that don't tell me anything. I would put a picture here but Listed apparently doesn't support it.

After seeing this and clicking through it I decided to give up and find a button inside Steam itself that would take me directly to its install location. It took me about 5 minutes? Maybe less? So finally after about half an hour I unpacked the Proton, restarted Steam and before I continued with it I wanted to know just where Steam was installed. It is inside a hidden folder in Home system folder... this is stupid.

It's not Proton's fault

I started Steam again, found Nine Sols, selected the GE-Proton and... nothing! At this point I though that maybe Linux have some issue accessing files that were creating on Windows. I know I turned Fast startup off or however it's called in Windows, because of this I was thinking that Windows wasn't locking the files but I cannot be sure so I removed the drive from Steam library and installed Nine Sols using the default install path that leads to Pop! OS Home partition and It works! For fun I switched back to Proton Hotfix that was selected from the very start and still, the game works. I have no idea now, but this will be a problem for future me, my goals for today are complete.

For fun I wanted to know where games are installed, for future modding. I really didn't felt like exploring the hell hole of Linux files again so I went the good ol' way of game -> manage -> browse local files. I am suprised, the access to game files are really easy. Now that I have enabled hidden files I can even get there faster then through Steam.