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BTRFS for Linux gaming? (lemy.lol)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by iso@lemy.lol to c/linux_gaming@lemmy.ml

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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 :)

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[–] ashaman2007@lemm.ee 8 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

I use openSUSE Tumbleweed and it has BTRFS and snapper (snapshot manager) set up by default, with all necessary system subvolumes already created. It’s been a great experience for gaming so far, and actually the best experience with NVIDIA drivers I’ve had! All you would need to do is create a separate BTRFS subvolume and snapper config for your games folder and you’d be good to go, without worrying about any other setup! No need to use EXT4 at all. Additionally, there is very detailed snapper documentation on the openSUSE website.

https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/leap/archive/15.0/reference/html/book.opensuse.reference/cha.snapper.html#id-1.4.3.4.2.2

Additionally, you can get support from the community in the openSUSE Matrix Space: https://matrix.to/#/%23space:opensuse.org

Use the support channel (#support:opensuse.org) or the gaming channel (#gaming:opensuse.org)

[–] hollyberries@programming.dev 6 points 6 months ago (1 children)

To answer the direct question, BTRFS works fine for gaming. Garuda uses BTRFS by default and I've been daily driving it for a few years now. My gaming machine hasn't had an unrecoverable failure that wasn't my fault (not checking consple output for errors when updating and then rebooting). Games on an ext4 file system work fine - that's what I do for games I don't play often. The main NVME is for games that are played regularly and everything else goes to the storage SSDs.

Correct me if I'm wrong, it seems like you want an immutable distro more than BTRFS for what you want to do.

[–] iso@lemy.lol 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I don't know much about immutable distros, but with a quick look, you're probably right. It looks like Bazzite is based on Fedora atomic desktop.

[–] hollyberries@programming.dev 2 points 6 months ago

Yeah same here regarding immutable distros. I've only dabbled in the reading and it seems to fit your use case. ^^

Keeping my eye on the thread for future reference. Best of luck!

[–] Lojcs@lemm.ee 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Just put steam on a different subvolume, otherwise your snapshots will be huge

Edit: to be clear, you can just put steamapps in a different subvolume keep the proton / save data folders in the snapshot area

[–] KindaABigDyl@programming.dev 5 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

There's no reason btrfs shouldn't work for every use case.

That said I think the slight performance gains of ext4 over btrfs make it worth sticking to ext4 for games. Imo it's similar to as if you had you main system on an HDD but ran games off of an SSD; that's how much faster it feels.

I would install games to a separate ext4 partition but steam to btrfs (for configs) in that case.

[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 5 points 6 months ago

I found that copying directories was much more convenient for this kind of experimentation, since I was usually already working in a filemanager anyways. And thanks to BTRFS's copy-on-write support it was also instantaneous and didn't take up any additional space. So in the end very similar to snapshots.

[–] Haijo7@snac.haijo.eu 3 points 6 months ago

what filesystem you use to store your games on shouldn't matter. as long as the file system is able to store the files you need and supports the file permissions unix systems use it doesn't really matter.
i recall things like file management are a little faster on btrfs, but it has no impact on game performance or loading times for as far as i'm aware