this post was submitted on 06 May 2024
1 points (100.0% liked)

Linux Gaming

17811 readers
123 users here now

Discussions and news about gaming on the GNU/Linux family of operating systems (including the Steam Deck). Potentially a $HOME away from home for disgruntled /r/linux_gaming denizens of the redditarian demesne.

This page can be subscribed to via RSS.

Original /r/linux_gaming pengwing by uoou.

No memes/shitposts/low-effort posts, please.

Resources

WWW:

Discord:

IRC:

Matrix:

Telegram:

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
1
submitted 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) by iso@lemy.lol to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.world
 

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 :)

all 9 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] pHr34kY@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago (3 children)

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.

[–] apt_install_coffee@lemmy.ml 1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

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.

[–] sparr@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

It depends on what sort of games you play. Some games / genres / publishers are much worse about this than others.

[–] pHr34kY@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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.

[–] victorz@lemmy.world 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Is the compression opt-in or is it enabled by default?

[–] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 1 points 11 months ago

You have to enable compression in fstab.

[–] Keegen@lemmy.zip 1 points 11 months ago

I use Fedora which defaults to BTRFS and never once had an issue with any game because of it. Your file system shouldn't matter for gaming at all so long as you stay on Linux native ones and avoid NTFS Windows drives.

[–] stebator@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

BTRFS is worth it. It's a bit faster than ext4. And with BTRFS assistant or snapper, you can configure automatic snapshots of your OS partition. And grub-btrfs will allow to integrate them to the boot menu. Once you are booted via snapshot, there is a way to replace / file system with that snapshot permanently, or you can boot to another one.

And remember, snapshots in BTRFS is just a formal thing, use them only if you specifically need their features, like read only sub volumes. If you just need to backup some directory, for example with steam games, no need to do the actual snapshot. You can easily backup large amount of data with just cp -dr dir dir_backup no matter how large is it, it will be done immidetelly and without taking additional space.