Linux Game Save Locations

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As I install more games on my computer I am finding it important to know where they store screenshots and saved games. I thought I would share what I found out.

I am using Linux Mint 19.3 – a debian/ubuntu distribution and other flavours of Linux might have different save paths.

Screenshots are easy. Mint comes with the Gnome Screenshot tool and the default save location is your home/username/pictures folder. – but you can set another location. Screenshots are a fun way to record interesting moments in games. Knowing where they are stored makes it easier to view and edit (or delete) them later.

Saved games are more important to find because they can accumulate quickly and make in-game navigation a pain. Deleting saves in-game is slow and I find it easier to go to the save folder and delete them as a group.

You can use the “whereis” command in the terminal to find game folders.

whereis aisleriot

aisleriot: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/aisleriot /usr/share/aisleriot

whereis freeorion

freeorion: /snap/bin/freeorion

The usr/share may be the save location for the .deb game saves but Aisleriot Solitaire doesn’t save games. The whereis for Freeorion only leads to the technical info for the game not the saves.

Finding the Freeorion save files was easy because a snap folder was put into my /home/username folder. Saved games are found in:

/home/username/snap/freeorion/common/save

Flatpak and Wine games are a bit harder to find unless you have your home folder set to “show hidden files”. For Flatpak look for the .var folder. For example:

/home/username/.var/app/org.openttd.OpenTTD/data/openttd/save

For Windows games running in Wine you start in the .wine folder. Most of my games in Windows were stored in Program Files so you can look first in:

/home/username/.wine/drive_c/Program Files

I hope this helps you manage your games. Happy gaming!

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Elly, Ascaris

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I use Kfind as my go-to file search tool. It’s a fully graphical search tool that’s part of the KDE Plasma desktop (though I do not remember if it was installed by default or not), though it might also work for non-Plasma desktops, in the same manner that I use a number of GNOME tools in Plasma. The result field is interactive, so you can go right from there to launching the file, opening its folder, deleting it, or whatever else you wish.

Another choice is Catfish, which uses the GTK+ (GNOME) toolkit for its UI, so it’s more “native” looking in Cinnamon and the other Mint desktops (all of which also use GTK+).  I haven’t found Catfish to be as powerful as Kfind, though, so if you can install Kfind in Mint without pulling in a trillion dependencies, it might be good to try them both, if you’re looking for that kind of thing.

Programs installed with WINE might be in other places than .wine, especially if you are using a program like Lutris or PlayOnLinux to manage them. You can have as many virtualized Windows environments as you wish, each one called a prefix (though the WINE documentation also sometimes refers to them as bottles… get it, WINE comes in a bottle… har har). By default, .wine is its own prefix, and installing multiple programs into that may work just fine. There may, though, come a time when you need specific settings for one program that do not work for others, and that’s what multiple WINE prefixes are good for.

Lutris makes the installation of many Windows games (into their own prefixes) really easy, as all you have to do is go to the Lutris site, navigate to the games library, find your game, then click the install button. It will have the browser download the Lutris install script, which should be associated with Lutris already, so just let it open that with Lutris and it will install and configure it for you.

If you use Steam Play and Proton to run Windows titles, or if you use native Linux games from Steam, you can simply use the Steam client to point you to the save data and the program installation, same as you would in Windows.

Dell XPS 13/9310, i5-1135G7/16GB, KDE Neon 6.2
XPG Xenia 15, i7-9750H/32GB & GTX1660ti, Kubuntu 24.04
Acer Swift Go 14, i5-1335U/16GB, Kubuntu 24.04 (and Win 11)

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firemind

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Lutris is handy. I haven’t used it with anything but City Of Heroes yet so the dire warning (lol) popup about missing vulkan drivers hasn’t been fulfilled. Vulkan can be found in the Mint store.

Loading can be a bit slow because Lutris talks to Wine which talks to Tequila. Things should go faster when the game developers replace  the Tequila launcher.

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