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?
With
compress=zstdZFS reports a 1.30 compression ratio on my Steam dataset, compressing it from ~1.2TB (reported by the file manager) down to 904GB (reported byzfs list -o name,usedds). Pretty good I think.Obviously it depends on the games. AAA crap will probably add tens/hundreds of GBs of pre-compressed asset blobs, while indie and older games will often have more loose file structures with config files, scripts, runtimes etc. that all compress extremely well. And with older games, even when compressed the algorithms are often far from ideal and zstd can still get a few more percent out of them.
Btrfs here, with zsdt:3, on my game data the compression ratio is a bit worse than that, but it does save some space to my surprise.
with default btrfs zstd compression here, i save a whole 2 percent on game install directories…but 48 percent elsewhere (trixie kde, ~ 2800 dpkg + flatpaks. ‘documents’ are on a diff filesystem)