I've been feeling inspired by the posts here and on /c/libre and have been switching over to a lot of FLOSS alternatives to software I use. One thing holding me back from switching to Linux is that my PC is how I play games and, as I understand it, most games aren't compatible with Linux so you either can't play them or they need software like Wine. How much of a problem is this really, since I've also heard that Linux gaming has been getting easier over the years.
Yes! I do that, actually. My laptop has a 2TB hard drive that the Windows partition sees as D:\ and the Linux partition sees as /DATA.
On Windows, I moved all my user libraries (pictures, documents, etc) to that drive, and on Linux I replaced the library directories in the home folder with symbolic links to the folders on /DATA. For individual games, you have to manually set the install location to somewhere on the shared medium each time. For something like Steam, you can set the install location in settings.
nice! what file system do you recommend for that? is there any you recommend for compatibility across mac os x, windows, and linux as well?
My shared drive is NTFS, but that's just because it came that way and I didn't bother to re-format it. Linux can read from it and write to it just fine. Someone else might have a better suggestion though. Don't use the default Linux file systems, Windows can't read them.
i think the best option i've seen is exFAT, but i forget why i don'l like using that. incompatible with more advanced hard drive setups maybe?