Any way to compress game files on linux? I know that all games vary, content vary and so on, but is there any things i can look out for in like an average steam game which I can compress, and the game can still run fine, tools or programs or anything?
The Btrfs and ZFS filesystems support compression.
This is how I do it. I put my Steam directory in an external BTRFS drive with compression turned on. Works great, and allows me to take my library between computers.
You’d get even more savings using something like
beesbecause it does block level deduplication.What
beesdoes is build a hash table of every block on your ssd, and compares them. If it finds any matches, it will delete one and just place a pointer to the other where the deleted one was, the pointer being much smaller than the duplicate data block.Functionally, any installed games with shared assets get space savings. It’s particularly helpful on with Steam games because of all the proton prefixes. Lots of opportunities for finding duplicate data blocks.
If you use snapshots, it can save even more.