Comment on What are (in your opnion) the must tweaks for steamos?

bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

• plumbercraic@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Also curious how you did this. Seems like a big job to wipe and reinstall with btrs

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  • bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Ext4 can be converted to BTRFS without data loss. The only downside is that you lose ext4’s capability to have case insensitive folders.

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    • Rolive@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨6⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Sounds like a benefit to me. Having a folder named “Documents” and “documents” is quite annoying.

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• filister@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  How did you do that? Did you re-format Steam Deck?

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  • bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    There’s an easy tool to do that. The beauty of ext4 is that it can be converted to BTRFS without any data loss.

    Can’t remember what the tool is called and by now I don’t use SteamOS any more. But a search engine of your choice should find it.

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  • Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    You can use this tool to convert the deck.

    The only downside I know of is that if your SteamOS install becomes corrupted (though a bug or from you messing something up), the Steam OS recovery drives won’t be able to fix it without wiping all your internal data. In comparison, with the original ext4 there’s a recovery option to only repair steamOS and leave your data intact.

    This isn’t as bad as it sounds, you can still manually backup any of your important data before wiping and restoring the drive (you can access the BTRFS system from the recovery drive, and copy anything important onto a microSD or other storage device), but it’s definitely less convenient.

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• mbirth@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  And BTRFS with compression and deduplication are great to save space.

  I’m not sure I’d go as far as replacing the file system. There’s a plethora of tools to do deduplication on ext4 as well. Albeit manually (or via cronjob).

  Also, btrfs seems to be slower for random reads than ext4. At least that was the case back in 2019.

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  • Fubarberry@sopuli.xyz ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    I’ve heard that using BTRFS with compression on a microSD and other slow access storage can actually speed up load times, because the biggest bottleneck is the read/write speed.

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    • mbirth@lemmy.ml ⁨9⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      If you’ve got a slow-ish SD card and a game that compresses very well, then this might be the case. But with a modern card from e.g. SanDisk or Samsung with U3 and A2 certifications, this probably won’t do that much.

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• ZeDoTelhado@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  Interesting one. I was aware of btrfs but never thought about for the deck. Heroic is on my toolbox already

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