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.
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.
If you’re messing with ACLs I’m not sure deduplication will help you much; I believe (not much experience with reflinks) the dedup checksum will include the metadata, so changing ACLs might ruin any benefit. Even if you don’t change the ACLs, as soon as somebody updates a game, it’s checksum will change and won’t converge back when everyone else updates.
Even hardlinks preserve the ACL… Maybe symlinks to the folder containing the game’s data, then the symlinks could have different ACLs?
I wrote a blog about it last year with my method of deduplicating. I really need to update that bit because steam keeps writing files that don’t uphold the group permissions, and others get permission errors that need to be fixed by admin. Steam also failed to determine free space on a drive when symlinks were involved.
I even found recently that steam would write files in /tmp/ as one user, and fail when you logged in as another user and tried to write the same file. Multi-user breaks even without messing around.
My current solution doesn’t use symlinks. I just add two libraries for each user. One in their respective home directory, and another shared in /mnt/steam. It means that any user can update a game in /mnt/steam, and it cleanly updates for all users at once.