Garuda saves casual gamer from Windows horrors

ALittleFinn · July 11, 2025, 12:15pm

Hello!

I’m new to Garuda, but not totally new to Linux. I’ve been playing around with Linux for the past 10+ years, but I couldn’t change to Linux because I’m a gamer (casual one but still). I’m more familiar with Ubuntu and Linux Mint, and I wouldn’t say those are gamer friendly. I am also not super confident with Konsole. I can use it, but I’m just super paranoid I’ll mess something up

When I found Garuda, it was love at first sight The reviews were excellent, most of my games were reported to work without extra tinkering, so I didn’t have an excuse not to switch anymore. I tested some distros in VirtualBox on my Windows so I could actually see what each distro looked like, and “get the vibes” as the kids these days say (I think ). I was debating between Bazzite and Garuda due to this video, but decided to go with Garuda because (to be honest) it’s prettier and dragons

I had an extra empty HD, so I decided to go with dual boot, just in case I would need Windows for some reason. I had some trouble with installation due to BIOS and Windows settings (is anyone surprised ), and the boot software I was using for installation. I finally tried using Ventoy (I was hesitant because I was not familiar with it), and after that, it couldn’t have been easier. Almost everything has been working perfectly since then ( so I don’t jinx it).

Only issues I have had have been self-inflicted I tried moving some of my saved games from Windows, and I somehow messed it up and had to do additional troubleshooting. TL;DR is: Game wouldn’t start, “fixed” it; Steam wouldn’t start, panic. I was finally able to actually fix it, but I didn’t try to restore the saved games anymore. I read somewhere that the issue might be that my Steam library is on NTFS HD (which apparently is a big no-no). The next task is to move all the files (1TB) from that HD to somewhere else temporarily and format it.

I also almost always seem to fail with pacdiff files, but luckily, those have just been mirror lists, and I have been able to fix them manually later.

I’m a little bit embarrassed to say that my saving grace with all these issues has been Google Gemini I’m sure I would have been able to find ways to fix these issues just with normal Google-Fu, but it would have taken me days, if not weeks.

I’ve been using Garuda for about a month, and I will never go back.

Also, the community and the team here in the forum seem super nice, so maybe next time I dare to ask for help here instead of AI.

P.S. Apologies for over use of emojis, I can’t help myself

SGS · July 11, 2025, 1:24pm

Welcome
I am not a man of many words, as long as it is not my mother tongue therefore

shayaknyc · July 11, 2025, 2:35pm

Akchewally (just being silly), if you mount your NTFS volume with “exec” parameters in fstab, you can absolutely install and run games on this volume. Here’s an example of my ntfs volume in /etc/fstab:

UUID=XXXXXXX     /mnt/win-c   ntfs3   user,rw,nosuid,nodev,relatime,exec,uid=XXXX,gid=XXXX,iocharset=utf8,uhelper=udisks2,dmask=022,fmask=133,x-systemd.automount  0 0

That said, sometimes if reboots/shutdowns aren’t graceful and don’t unmount NTFS properly - it can cause a dirty bit to be applied to the drive and then it won’t mount - but this is easily fixable with linux-ntfs-tools (see here: https://www.reddit.com/r/archlinux/comments/11qezjd/correctly_checking_ntfs_partitions_dont_use/). According to this article, Paragon, who supplied the kernel support for RW NTFS volumes, kinda borked the ntfsfix tool, and all it does is clear the bit, without actually fixing the drive. They used to include the chkntfs utility in one of their Android APKs, which included x86-compiled binaries of the tool, which you can extract from the APK and use in linux. I’ve personally used this and can confirm it works as well as if you rebooted back into Windblowz and used the native disk repair. If you need help finding/getting the binaries out of the APK, lemme know.

MrHakkuh · July 27, 2025, 11:18pm

Welcome to the club!

gampel · July 28, 2025, 10:38am

Fstab option default for ntfs partitions should be “nofail,”
if not and the drive is dirty flagged → system will not boot.
But the system boot and “tells” you that was going wrong with this drive if you insert this. (journal)

default is this ntfs-3g (fuse based driver in userspace)
ntfs3 is a in-tree kernel driver
ntfs-3g is default installed in garuda linux

Your risk to loss data is high if you use ntfs “extensive” ..exfat for both oss on ext. drive..ok..but more = (my mind)

ALittleFinn · July 28, 2025, 11:07am

Thanks for the tip I already have the “nofail” because I’m paranoid

But I think I’ll still reformat the hard drives at some point,t but it’s not super urgent because of the “nofail”.

tbg · July 28, 2025, 9:09pm

If you were sufficiently paranoid, you would not be using NTFS drives at all.

You will inevitably lose data if you persist in using NTFS in Linux for an extended period of time. Eventually you will encounter a data corruption that cannot be corrected using Linux or Windows tools. I have done a lot of data recovery in my many years of computer use. I gave up on NTFS 15 years ago, after the second instance of an NTFS drive that was corrupted and was completely unrecoverable.

Using NTFS in Linux is like playing Russian roulette. The odds are usually in your favor that you will be able to correct any drive corruption when it occurs. That is until your luck runs out, and then you can kiss all your data goodbye.

ALittleFinn · July 29, 2025, 8:50am

Thank you for the clarification. I’ll just have to make time to do the formatting sooner than planned

shayaknyc · July 29, 2025, 8:39pm

With respect, I had a litany of issues when using ntfs-3g - FWIW, when I installed Garuda, ntfs-3g was not installed by default, the in-tree kernel driver worked far better than ntfs-3g - especially with the latest update that it’s resolving a long issue with NTFS symlinks.

gampel · July 30, 2025, 8:12am

Take a look in “iso”.pkgs.txt. The xxx.txt from 23 i don’t have…but from year 24 to current in all exist this package.
I use ntfs-3g now very long and I haven’t had any problems so far. But never i use the option rw for ntfs and i have no automount for ntfs. That makes the difference, perhaps.

shayaknyc · July 30, 2025, 5:33pm

Ah! Yes…I need RW and I have it automount. ntfs-3g did not do good things for my partitions with RW.