Best practices for gaming PC?

[notbln]

I apologise if this is the wrong place to post this question, however any help would be greatly appreciated.

I have recently started testing Manjaro Linux on my main PC and am now looking to completely switch to it. However, in my brief testing, I noticed Steam, Lutris and other programs facing issues with installing games/runners on my secondary drive. Upon research, I have read posts about people redirecting their /home folder to their secondary drive and I have learnt about how Linux “mounts” (or rather, doesn’t) drives compared to Windows. To avoid any issues, I wanted to ask the question: what is the best configuration practice for the following scenario?

256GB NVMe SSD (to store the OS and for programs non-related to gaming)
1TB hard drive (for games/game launcher data, etc)

Any advice would be greatly appreciated, thank you in advance-

[Aragorn]

@notbln

256GB NVMe SSD (to store the OS and for programs non-related to gaming)
1TB hard drive (for games/game launcher data, etc)

You can do that, but if you have two drives at your disposal, then I would recommend creating an additional partition on the 1 TB drive for storing backups. Trust me, you’ll be happy that you did.

[Jim.B]

What partitions to create depends on if the motherboard is eufi or bios. But that being said I would put all the OS partitions on the SSD, and use half of it to create a games partition for your most played game(s) and mount it in the OS with the fstab. The hd I would make into one partition to store files/seldom played games/media/backups and mount it in the OS with the fstab. To move directories to where you want them create symlinks.

[Aragorn]

Here’s a couple of tutorials that may provide inspiration.

[Tutorial] Working with additional 'drives'

Difficulty: ★★☆☆☆ 1. INTRODUCTION Microsoft Windows started its life as a graphical user interface on top of MS-DOS, a 16-bit single-user, single-tasking operating system that in turn originated as 86DOS, an unauthorized 16-bit rewrite (by Tim Paterson of Seattle Computer) of Digital Research’s originally 8-bit CP/M operating system. Both CP/M and MS-DOS were at the time developed for computers that did not support any other storage media than floppy disks. Considering this legacy, Microso…

[Tip] Root filesystem nearly full but got a spare partition sitting around? Split off some stuff!

Difficulty: ★★★☆☆ Introduction As you should all already know by now, GNU/Linux is a FLOSS variant of the UNIX operating system design, and UNIX does not know the concept of drive letters, nor does it approach storage from the vantage of having different volumes. Instead, everything is mounted into a uniform directory hierarchy, so that regardless of what physical medium any particular group of files resides on ─ even if this physical medium is actually located in another computer across the…

[gero45]

I guess there is no real way around choosing between three options (that you basically already mentioned):

• either make a /home partition on the second drive
• or create a seperate partition on the second drive and configure each program (Lutris etc.) seperately to use folders on the second drive
• or create a seperate partition on the second drive and move & symlink the folders that are used by the programs to the second drive

One additional note: I used to simply copy Game folders around, but while some Games worked after that, others didn’t.
I guess that some Games simply have some additional configuration somewhere in other folders or in the registry (when using Wine etc.).
So simply copying is not really a reliable option, sadly.

[Jim.B]

If you mainly use Lutris, in the games partition on the ssd put the Games folder that normally is in Home. Symlink it into home. On the HD make another Games folder. Once the Games folder on the SSD fills up move less played games to the Games folder on the HD and symlink them to the Games folder on the SSD.
The reason to have games you play often on the SSD is loading times for the games. A seperate Home partition on the HD isnt a bad idea. but make it reasonably big, say 30-50gb. You will be surprised how fast a small Home fills up. You can always shrink it later if HD space becomes an issue.