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by KyleGospo 903 days ago
Fedora actually defaults to BTRFS, in the case of SteamOS the system is BTRFS out of the box, and only home and the SD card are ext4.

Main benefits are compression, and increased read speeds from compressed drives, especially from the MicroSD.

BTRFS de-duplication also solves the issue of wine prefixes with similar dependencies taking up more space than needed.
1 comments
xvector 903 days ago
Why is it not the default? Compatibility issues with Windows games somehow?
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xyproto 903 days ago
BTRFS is probably mature and stable by now, but it's been a rocky road with several premature declarations of maturity.
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KyleGospo 903 days ago
I can only speculate Valve's reasoning, but there are a very select few games that require actual case folding and not the simulated case folding that wine offers. I know of literally only one.
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nephyrin 903 days ago
SteamOS dev here - lack of case folding is one (but solvable, we supported development on native case folding for ext4), but general stability issues are the main concern. Our testing with btrfs has not been promising for deploying it in a zero-maintenance manner to many users and finnicky SD cards and have it Just Work, but we're keeping an eye on things and weighing where we could contribute.
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bsimpson 902 days ago
Have you done any performance testing with btrfs compression?

I have a Legion Go. I don't have the specs handy now, but the SSD was rated fast enough that I suspected compression would harm my overall performance.

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jonny_eh 903 days ago
Is there a way for adventurous users to opt into using BTRFS on SD cards?
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KyleGospo 902 days ago
https://gitlab.com/popsulfr/steamos-btrfs
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freedomben 903 days ago
Can you help me with some searchable terms for learning about case folding? Is that something specific to games? Specific to disk formats?
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KyleGospo 903 days ago
It's a file system feature, all it means to be case folding is that capital and non-capital letters are treated the same, as NTFS does.

All Linux filesystems will by default allow "TEST" and "test" and "Test" to exist in the same folder, which no Windows application is ever intended to handle. Wine works around this by default.

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anticensor 902 days ago
NTFS is also case sensitive, however case folding is done at search time according to default windows settings.

Windows apps are expected to handle case sensitivity gracefully in non-FAT filesystems.

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