if you try to play games on an NTFS drive on Linux you WILL run into problems

What kind of problems? I REALLY don’t want to have hundreds of gigabytes in duplicate files on my system.

Yeah Ventoy did the trick for me eventually but then I ran into the next issue, namely that the instructions said to place the ISO on the drive. What I actually needed to do was to mount the ISO and to copy the files contained therein to USB.

Thanks for pointing out the folder location. That was it. Now I don’t have to launch the Battle.Net installer each time I want to play Hearthstone (added it to Steam as an external game, which is not a bad idea, if a bit awkward).

Next will be how to share my Steam libraries between OSes and retain access to my (cloud) saves. Making first steps there with mounting my existing drives… but now I have to learn how to edit FSTAB… sigh.

Okay, I finally installed a new SSD yesterday so I could dual boot and put CachyOS on it. Played a few games and it worked surprisingly well.

But it did take quite a bit more doing than installing Windows. The USB drive wouldn’t boot when made with Rufus and I don’t quite get how to manage the games installed in Proton (like where is their virtual C: drive?).

I plan on migrating more of my stuff onto Linux in the coming days and will see if it can’t replace Windows eventually for me.