this post was submitted on 17 May 2026
27 points (90.9% liked)
Linux
65327 readers
577 users here now
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
Rules
- Posts must be relevant to operating systems running the Linux kernel. GNU/Linux or otherwise.
- No misinformation
- No NSFW content
- No hate speech, bigotry, etc
Related Communities
Community icon by Alpár-Etele Méder, licensed under CC BY 3.0
founded 7 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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.
Have you measured the difference? Is it huge? I’m curious to understand what the trade-offs are and how many more games can you store on the same drive.
Depends on the game. A title like dota will have a lot of savings (tens of gigabytes last I checked it). Other games don’t have obviously and easily compressible assets from a generic compression algorithm, and therefore will not yield extremely minor savings.
My main goals are efficient space usage and portability, so I've never measured anything. I'll get some stats for you.
I would appreciate even not very accurate comparison just to get the idea. A brief search meanwhile showed me it’s a great idea actually. But having someone who uses that to comment would be great too. Thanks.