Finally ready to switch my final windows device over to linux, but I'm running into a problem. NTFS drives aren't a good idea under Linux, but my 4 NTFS drives are this full. I own zero extra hard drives, and do not want to spend $300 on another one. 
How can I bring these files into Bazzite WITHOUT just wiping everything and re-downloading 10+ terabytes of movies, shows, music, games, and other data I refuse to delete?
How about pirated games? I am ethically opposed to paying for copied digital content.
How does that even work? Can I just run the fitgirl (or whoever) installer in wine? Last time I tried this (c. 2009) you were just up shit creek without a paddle when it came to all game piracy on Linux.
That worked for me last time I tried.
You will have to reinstall your pirated games from the repack and let Lutris (or Heroic or Faugus or whatever other launcher gui) make a wine prefix (sort of a fake little windows filesystem for each game to live in) for each game. Trying to just take the already installed games and make proton run them will result in all sorts of weird hard to fix problems.
For audio and video content NTFS will work alright.
For games you should use a linux native filesystem like ext4 or btrfs. Bazzite itself will warn you about this if you plug in an NTFS drive.
The last tried I installing fitgirl was years ago and it did not work. I have seen people on reddit say that her installers work under proton but I have never been able to replicate it. I have taken to downloading pre-installed repacks or clean steam files and cracking them myself. On cs.rin, repackers like rexagames or astralgames will post suck repacks. You are supposed to just unzip and run these repacks. There is a significant downside to this that these repacks are not usually distributed via torrent so you need to download them from file hosting websites. But it works at least. I have been pirating the shit out my steam deck this way.
So I can't just download ISOs from my private tracker anymore?
uncompressed shit like that is ideal actually and should work fine, I've had issues with fit girl on Linux i think due to her uncompressing tool
Those isos from scene releases have a higher chance of working. Their setup wizards are simpler and should work under wine. I have used updates from RUNE and such and they worked fine. Fitgirl's installer doesn't work probably because of the decompression it does.
The important thing is to install the games on ext4 or btrfs because the read performance from NTFS is kinda bad. So while NTFS will work for audio-video, games don't work well on it.
Is there an advantage to btrfs for gaming? Idk if bazzite does compression or not, but should that be on or off?
Compressing something already compressed is pointless. So like emails or source code compress well, but video, audio or game assets do not at all basically. So doesn't matter for those things whether you have it enabled, and the overall percentage of uncompressed stuff on your drive is probably rather low, and mostly very small files.
I think the CPU overhead should be very small, but I haven't tried it myself. Plus if you actually have something that compresses well, it should actually be faster to access because you're almost certainly not CPU-limited, but rather limited by the read/write speed of the disk.
No advantage over, say, ext4. I mentioned it because it is a good filesystem and bazzite chooses it by default so you probably have it. Also it has the best name.
You can check if compression if enabled by checking the contents of the fstab file (
cat /etc/fstabin the terminal). It will say something likecompression=zstd. It will likely be enabled.There is no disadvantage to having compression on. These compression algorithms are designed to be used on the fly and are very fast. The overhead on a mildly modern system is imperceptible.
Whether you get mileage out of it is another matter. At a previous job I saw 20% reduced space usage on a postgres machine. On my laptop however the same stat is just 1%. It depends on the kinds of files you have.
You can have it work too, you just run the installer through Proton, either through Steam or Heroic Games Launcher, Faugus, Vermouth, Bottles or Lutris (I find Heroic the easiest).
I prefer to use Hydra Launcher to download the games then install it through Heroic, but you can download directly from fitgirl or dodi or whatever. Hydra recently got Proton support but I haven't tested it yet to see if it's any good.
Also, if you're planning to use Bazzite, in their Bazzite Portal app you can find a setting to enable deduplication, if you enable that on your OS drive it should help with saving a bit of space, it's very useful with gaming since proton prefixes might have a lot of duplicated data.
There's always my option: Getting into physical hobbies!
(To be clear I'm being facetious.)
HA!
I've started walking daily, and I hope to start a couch to 5k plan soon. My inflammation is a lot better lately, and it's nice to be able to move again!