I’m using EndeavourOS with ext4 file system for daily usage and a dual bootable Windows for gaming. What I want to have right now is getting rid of Windows completely.
When I tried it before, I had to try multiple tweaks for a game and find which one worked on Linux. Therefore, I want to take a snapshot with BTRFS and try it until I find the right configuration.
While I have quite a bit of experience with Linux, I’ve never used BTRFS. Do you think it’s worth it?
I thought about keeping the games on the ext4 system, but I hate splitting the disk. I’m thinking of keeping the games in a non-snapshot volume.
UPDATE: I just re-installed EndeavourOS with BTRFS + snapper + BTRFS Assistant :)
Btrfs is amazing for a steam library. The single best feature is the compression. Games tend to have lot of unoptimized assets which compress really well. Because decompression is typically faster than your disk, it can potentially make games load faster too.
I put a second dedicated nvme drive in my PC just for steam. It’s only 512GB but it holds a surprisingly large library.
I actually found the opposite with my steam library; on ZFS with ZSTD I only saw a ratio of 1.1 for steamapps, not that there’s really any meaningful performance penalty for compressing it.
It depends on what sort of games you play. Some games / genres / publishers are much worse about this than others.
OK I just measured mine. I have 459GiB of games on the drive, consuming 368GiB of space. That’s about 25% compression. I’m using
compress=zstd:9.I should try deduplication. I have 4 steam users and I’ve created an ACL hell to prevent the same game being downloaded and installed twice.
and
my axededuping. all those dlls and wine prefixes that contain them occupy space only once.Is the compression opt-in or is it enabled by default?
You have to enable compression in fstab.