Recently had a question about a game running on the deck, and actually got me thinking since steamos settings were briefly discussed: what are the settings to change for a steam deck, or tools to add? I do not mean more fps or more performance per say only, but more battery life or just better tools for certain aspects of the deck.
Heroic, Lutris or Bottles have to be installed to easier manage non-Steam games.
And BTRFS with compression and deduplication are great to save space.
Also curious how you did this. Seems like a big job to wipe and reinstall with btrs
Ext4 can be converted to BTRFS without data loss. The only downside is that you lose ext4’s capability to have case insensitive folders.
Sounds like a benefit to me. Having a folder named “Documents” and “documents” is quite annoying.
How did you do that? Did you re-format Steam Deck?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Interesting one. I was aware of btrfs but never thought about for the deck. Heroic is on my toolbox already