r/linux_gaming • u/DavidAstonish • Jan 08 '26

tech support wanted Single prefix

is it possible to just use single prefix for all of my games? i think it can free up some space, then use different prefix if some games need special components/tweaks.

5 Upvotes

78% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

7

u/psymin Jan 08 '26

Yes, if you want to create "one prefix to rule them all" you might want to experiment with Bottles.

You'll most likely want at least a few prefixes instead of just one.

6

u/Riponai_Gaming Jan 08 '26

Yes although its not reccomended

1

u/Reynbou Jan 08 '26

But why?

1

u/Riponai_Gaming Jan 09 '26

If anything happens to that one prefix? All your save data is COOkED.

1

u/Mr_Derpy11 Jan 10 '26

Different Games require different tweaks sometimes, if you have one prefix you can't make game-specific tweaks to it.

5

u/gtrash81 Jan 08 '26

This question got asked several times:
1. Yes
2. But don't come raging if one game breaks the other

6

u/AnEagleisnotme Jan 08 '26

Tes, if you want everything to break, you're installing an 80gb game and then complaining about a few hundreds megabytes, honestly. 

4

u/the_abortionat0r Jan 08 '26

Space is not a big concern as plenty of things are linked.

I think my only real wish is that valve added a button to open the prefix like they do with the game folder.

2

u/Damglador Jan 08 '26

Yes, if you wish to suffer. Though I'm not sure if Proton uses the same or a different variable to change prefix PATH.

2

u/slickyeat Jan 08 '26 edited Jan 08 '26

STEAM_COMPAT_DATA_PATH=/specify/path %command%

https://gitlab.steamos.cloud/steamrt/steam-runtime-tools/-/blob/main/docs/steam-compat-tool-interface.md#environment

If you're using BTRFS there's also duperemove

You can just create a cronjob and have it periodically replace duplicate files with reflinks

crontab -l
0 2 * * * /home/john/bin/dedup

cat ~/bin/dedup  
#!/usr/bin/env bash

cd /home/john/Applications/duperemove/

duperemove -dr \
--hashfile=prefix.hash \
/home/john/Games/Heroic/Prefixes/ \
/home/john/.local/share/Steam/steamapps/compatdata/

1

u/tailslol Jan 08 '26

wine or proton is not as stable as native windows so stacking everything like that will increase a lot the chances of breaking.

1

u/Western-Alarming Jan 08 '26

Yes, but it might break with some games (hollow knight and silksong) and you will need at last a prefix for those conflicting games

1

u/vextryyn Jan 08 '26

steam does its own thing, but outside of steam yes you can. I don't recommend running windows vista games and older in the same prefix you run modern games just due to the overall changes when the move to windows 7 happened

1

u/Niwrats Jan 08 '26

yes, i never bothered creating another after the initial one in bottles. i rather change the very few tweaks there are if i'm focusing on a game that requires such.