Are you a troll or something? :huh:

Quoting: CyrilAre you a troll or something? :huh:

Not everyone who struggles with some aspects of Linux is a troll. Some of us just hope that open source will continue to get better.

Is it wasted space if it lets you game?

My preferred set up:

* 1 or 2 TB NVMe SSD for the OS.
* 1 or 2 TB NVMe SSD for current games you want to load fast.
* 12 TB HDD for everything else (games you don't need to load fast, archives and etc.).

Never had an issue with OS and tools taking too much storage space. If anything, having too many games can eat storage. But that's why HDD can be useful. I doubt you play all of those games at once to mandate placing them all on your SSD at all times.

So keep rarely played games on the HDD and move frequently / currently played ones to your SSD. Move them back to the HDD when you don't play them often anymore.

Prices on storage dropped so much that above shouldn't be an issue if you manage your set up well.

Last edited by Shmerl on 22 Jan 2023 at 8:21 pm UTC

Quoting: Craggles086So your gaming distro of choice uses more then half of your harddrive or SSD on your laptop.

200 Gig or somewhere close to 400 Gig, that should be enough shouldn't it?

Forget using 120 Gig to install games, and the idea that Linux could operate comfortably on as little as 80 Gig might have been true 10 years ago but...

And we are not talking about the games themselves.

Wine / Proton / anything starting with GE.
Steam / Heroic / Legendary / Emulators

As soon as you need to rely on FlatPak for your gaming needs then say goodbye to half your diskspace, then spend the next hour or two trying to get it back.

*If you do perchance try to install some old games through heroic like an old warcraft title that now tries to include battlenet in the install, then uninstalling Warcraft 2 will not get your diskspace back.*

I think you're misinterpreting System and App memory...
Well my system install is just 111GB and that includes 74GB of additional development frameworks for several versions of Qt, Android, etc. So the "system" is occupying less than 40GB. But that actually includes lots of additional applications installed from the distro repos, which on windows you wouldn't see as system disk usage but somewhere in "program files". So the actual base system is using a lot less.
When you install additional stuff like games, they surely take a lot amount of space. Basically the issue here or what's using much additional space is the libraries as each app/game brings their own set. Unfortunately you rarely can use those from the system (i.e. Qt) as they quickly become incomaptible with the next patch/update, unless you directly use Xlib for GUI (barely anyone does that). That's only applicable if you have an OSS game which gets recompiled / updated at the same time... So, yes, there's an overhead compared to Windows regarding install size. But for big games it should be small compared to the game data (3d-models, levels, movies, audio, etc.)
What's also using up much memory is the shadercache created by steam. So it's also the App/Game programmers which create much disk usage. And you can't solve that on the system side.
In the end it depends on what you're trying to do on your computer. And I always found I get along with a significantly smaller system drive on Linux than on Windows.

My desktop is for gaming only. I've a 250GB NVME drive. It's half full and that includes some rather large games like The Witcher 3 with graphics mods.

Oh and 8 have Steam, Lutris, and heroic installed.

Yeah, multiple versions of wine/proton take up space, but not that much.

Sounds like you have a lot of cruft from previous installs of games. Cleaning them up ought to save you a bunch of space!!

Quoting: Craggles086

Quoting: CyrilAre you a troll or something? :huh:

Not everyone who struggles with some aspects of Linux is a troll. Some of us just hope that open source will continue to get better.

We all agree on that.
But dude...

Quoting: Craggles086So your gaming distro of choice uses more then half of your harddrive or SSD on your laptop.

200 Gig or somewhere close to 400 Gig, that should be enough shouldn't it?

Forget using 120 Gig to install games, and the idea that Linux could operate comfortably on as little as 80 Gig might have been true 10 years ago but...

This is utterly wrong...

Well, of course there is more overhead running games through translation environments. Or worse, silly distros where you have to run this stuff in containers.

Use Windows if that bothers you. Open source isn't going to make that better, unless the games themselves are released that way. (Then, they could be compiled natively and linked to your system libraries etc.)

P.S. I used to keep a Windows install for games, then I was free to have the Linux system I wanted for the rest of my usage. Nowadays I have two Linux systems. One fat free, and the other that has the environment I need for games.

Last edited by Grogan on 23 Jan 2023 at 2:24 am UTC

2 words: BTRFS compression.
Sure, if you have many Wine prefixes they take up a lot of disk space but Wine compresses wery well, you can reclaim %75-90 disk space by just using compression and I am not even going into deduplication. For shader caches I don't have much to recommend but they are usually around %10 of the game's size and a shader cache must exist for Windows as well (idk how large it is) so Linux is not at disadvantage here. Manager applications like Heroic, Lutris etc. don't actually take up a significant amount of disk space.

Quoting: Craggles086Linux could operate comfortably on as little as 80 Gig

I have installed a full fat Linux distribution (Pop OS) to a 16 GiB thumb drive and have more than half free space. I can install Steam and HOI4 with all DLC and still have plenty of disk space available.

Quoting: GuestAhah, this doesn't help in regard of used disk space for sure :)

No, but it does allow me to have a no-nonsense, pure 64 bit setup tailored exactly to my wants and needs, for normal use. I play some native games and open source games there, but the gaming system needs a lot more libraries, including all the multilib builds of everything and a lot of things that make me want to barf.

I don't like eating dogfood, so I make a lot of work for myself on both setups, too.

It would actually save disk space to just use Windows for games and have only have one custom Linux setup. However, I would just buy another 2 Tb NVME if I need more storage for games. I don't need to have them all installed at once, though. I'm actually having to remove games I'm not playing because I've filled up a 2 Tb dedicated to games (Steam is installed there, my Lutris wine prefixes are stored there etc.)

Yeah, My fault.

I was frustrated and may have exaggerated the figures a "little bit".

Will check how much disk space Flatpak is using,

and if I have a few GB taken up by SystemD error logs,
or installed more games then I intended.

Have not played around with BTRFS, Will have to give it a go.

Why didn't Valve use BTRFS for the SteamDeck?
They need the raw speed? Which EXT3 / EXT4 is better at?

Might end up doing a clean install.

Thanks for all the constructive critique. :smile:

Last edited by Craggles086 on 24 Jan 2023 at 1:10 am UTC

Quoting: Craggles086Why didn't Valve use BTRFS for the SteamDeck?
They need the raw speed? Which EXT3 / EXT4 is better at?

Don't use EXT4. XFS is better if you need a classic type filesystem.

Last edited by Shmerl on 24 Jan 2023 at 2:14 am UTC

Quoting: Craggles086Why didn't Valve use BTRFS for the SteamDeck?
They need the raw speed? Which EXT3 / EXT4 is better at?

Ext4 supports casefolding while BTRFS does not, casefolding fixes some odd issues in a few Windows games. Also compression supposedly decreases battery life so Valve saw no advantage of BTRFS.

Solved.

actually if we have to use transgaming tech so we do need some more disk space cuz we have some extra stuff.
if we use native apps we dont need more space than actually game requires.
also ext4 rulez.

I don't use launchers. I have 9 games installed at this time - 7.6 GB in total.

i use a 4TB USB drive for my /home + games because i never know which game i might want to play, when i actually get a chance to play one

Relative to this discussion: https://ludocode.com/blog/flatpak-is-not-the-future

Unfortunately containerization took the easy route and is just passing around “all-in-one” blobs. I hope this changes eventually but there is a lot of work to be done. I emailed the author about the possible ideas in the above blog post and how dependency hell can be fixed.

Quoting: itscalledrealityRelative to this discussion: https://ludocode.com/blog/flatpak-is-not-the-future

Unfortunately containerization took the easy route and is just passing around “all-in-one” blobs. I hope this changes eventually but there is a lot of work to be done. I emailed the author about the possible ideas in the above blog post and how dependency hell can be fixed.

Well worth reading, although how Linux goes about simplifying this is anyone's guess.

Will spend more time on his linked articles.
Was hoping he would go into more detail about Wine and Proton. Or even packaging Wine/Proton as Flatpak. Maybe next time.

https://www.dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html

https://www.infoworld.com/article/3639050/complexity-is-killing-software-developers.html

Quoting: itscalledrealityRelative to this discussion: https://ludocode.com/blog/flatpak-is-not-the-future

Flatpak is today, like it or not. If anyone doesn't believe me, I will kindly ask them to take a look at the Steam Software & Hardware Survey and the backend of its software store.