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?
If you make any changes to the game files in Steam, including compression, then Steam will update the files and redownload them. And for online games, you could even get a ban if an Anticheat system thinks you try to cheat because the files are tempered (changed).
However there is a transparent compression available on filesystem level. Meaning files are saved compressed and look and work like uncompressed files. Something similar what Windows has I believe. EXT4 does not have transparent compression, but I often read Btrfs and ZFS do. I have no experience with that, so cannot assist. But at least you should be able to search for this now. Have in mind that compressed filesystem would be slower.
Often the opposite is true, depending on case. Compressed files load faster, so if you have the cpu power to spare (which you usually have in games while loading) and loading speed is the bottle-neck then compression speeds things up, often considerably.
And even in the age of ssds processing data and moving it through ram is much faster than the disk, so even for writing some amount of transparent compression is possible without affecting speeds.
If you have a fast CPU adding compression can actually improve performance. https://www.phoronix.com/review/btrfs-zstd-compress
with fast nvme not that much… not like the ‘olden days’ of msdos and stacker where it was actually noticeable on some systems.
Hmm, looks like it can be slower on write, but faster on read depending on the CPU and drive probably. Games mostly read files, so this might even improve performance.
I would suggest Btrfs for regular use. ZFS is better for server use and redundancy in systems with critical data you don’t want to lose. It also uses all your ram as cache and will give it back to you if you need it, but still has a harder performance hit on things you run. Be overkill for just wanting to save a little space. A lot of new gaming distros like Bazzite suggest using Btrfs on all secondary drives.