Can Wine / Proton / any translation layer run games from external drives? (feddit.nl)

submitted 1 year ago by JVT038@feddit.nl to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.ml

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I'm currently using Windows 10, but I'd like to switch to linux.

I know it's crazy and weird, but I currently have 3 SSDs and 2 HDDs. One M.2. SSD is used for the OS (Windows 10 in this case) and the other two SSDs are used for games (I currently have about 1.7TB of games on my PC, spread across two SSDs of 1TB each). Besides that, I have one HDD used for general files and the other one for emulated games. (In my case, mainly my totally legal copies of various games from the high seas and a ton of Wii games for the dolphin emulator).

If I were to switch to Linux, would it be possible to keep storing and running the games from other drives that aren't the C drive? And would it be possible to keep my emulation games (mainly the Wii games) on my separate HDD?

Besides that, is it possible to run ~~cracked~~ totally legally acquired games but just from a .exe file?

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[-] teutoburg1@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 year ago

One of the basic differences between windows and Linux is that instead of C:\your_folder or D:\your_folder is that you mount drives as directories wherever you want in the filesystem. For example /home/username/documents could be on drive A while /home/username/games could be on drive B or even on a remote server. It's actually pretty common to put the entire /home directory on a separate drive which makes reinstalling or changing the distro very easy.

So to answer your question, yes you can put your games wherever you want and they will run seamlessly. Wine can be pointed straight at an .exe. the only thing that gets a little weird is when you try and run programs remotely through a network share, but you can usually solve that with symlinks.

this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2023

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