I don't think it is that surprising. I mean, Valve talks about using a symbolic link for the "steamapps" folder.. and that link obviously is to the NTFS copy. The purpose is not having the same apps or data installed twice, because you're literally taking w/e space you take up now, and doubling it just to run on Linux. Fine for people who don't have Windows, but not so good for someone who dual boots. I don't see why an NTFS partition wouldn't perform well, and in fact can confirm there is no difference when running Wine. I've ran Steam, Half-Life 2, Trillian, Firefox (win), Skype (win), etc.. several programs. Quite a bit does work straight off the NTFS partition, with no performance difference from that of a Wine EXT4 install. Now, I think one program that wouldn't load is 3D Studio Max, so perhaps that requires an install to work. I'll have to try. But I wasted my time installing a copy of HL2 and a mod onto Ubuntu's journaling system EXt4 w/e, and it doesn't improve the performance one bit, the lag is a D3D issue. I'd have to force Source engine to run at like DirectX 7, and low resolution, with ultra low settings probably. I'll probably keep the separate copy of Steam installed via Wine, but the link to the game content will be symbolic link to the NTFS partition.
