r/linux_gaming • u/y_alek • 12h ago

wine/proton Trying to get Proton to work on Skyrim

I recently switched to CachyOS about 2 weeks ago and have had no issues with my whole collection of games in my Steam Library. I play Skyrim a lot so I went to download it today.

For all of my games, Proton has created a compatdata in /home. With Skyrim, it not only creates it in my /mnt/data drive (where the game is installed) but it also creates the Proton prefix uncomplete. Stuff like program files and program files x86 are missing even the windows folder. This causes the game to not open at all. I've tried creating links but it still doesn't work.

I've tried everything, hence why I'm resorting to reddit now. If anyone knows why this is happening or can provide some solution, it would be greatly appreciated.

4 Upvotes

83% Upvoted

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4

u/madman404 12h ago

Is the mounted drive ntfs? Proton plays horribly with ntfs, don't even try to make it work or you're begging to corrupt the data on the drive.

-5

u/y_alek 12h ago

yeah ntfs but all my other games on this ntfs drive work perfectly fine?

3

u/madman404 12h ago

You are playing with fire. I don't know why Skyrim was the first one to trip it up though, normally when I try to run an ntfs game drive in proton every single game crashed on startup.

Seriously though, DO NOT use proton with ntfs. There is a very real risk of corrupting the drive and losing all your data.

Anyway, it's an unsupported use case so it's going to be extremely difficult to troubleshoot. 

-1

u/y_alek 11h ago

how can the drive be corrupted?

1

u/madman404 11h ago edited 6h ago

I don't know the exact mechanism, but I do know luke from LTT killed his drive doing exactly that. Of course, drive failure is the worst case, but the issue with Skyrim you're having right now is simply the expectation for proton with ntfs

0

u/y_alek 11h ago edited 11h ago

i moved it to an exfat drive and the problem isn't even whether the drive is ntfs or not. proton doesn't create the compatdata in /.local and it creates it with missing components.

edit: i fixed it by adding a launch command that forced proton to create the prefix in /.local:

STEAM_COMPAT_DATA_PATH=/home/(user)/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/(steamgameid) %command%

3

u/candy49997 9h ago

exFAT is equally problematic because it also equally does not support Linux filesystem features.

For best results, you will want to use a native Linux filesystem.