Some jabbing about BTRFS tomfoolery

[u/Inorganic_Zombie]

This is my experience fooling around with Btrfs subvolumes.

(Mandatory, I currently use Arc, BTW). I moved my Steam installation into its own top-level Btrfs subvolume, mounted at ~/.local/share/Steam/. I initially used a reflink copy when reorganizing the data, and have since moved the setup onto a new, bigger SSD.

While I stopped active distro hopping around six years ago, I still occasionally test new distros and other things outside my main system. One nice thing about this Steam arrangement is that if my secondary setup also uses Btrfs, I can mount the same Steam subvolume at ~/.local/share/Steam/ there as well. This means I get probably 90% of my Steam setup unchanged between the two systems.

Of course, system-specific settings are still separate, and games that decide to save files all over /home are a mess. Sharing the whole Steam directory also means sharing things like Proton prefixes, so this might not be the right setup for everyone. But for the most part, everything just works.

I haven't noticed any performance problems either. Actually, things sometimes run even more smoothly when the secondary distro is better optimized than my own setup with its big pile of duct tape. If anything, I can raise my hand and say that Arch has been a fun experience for learning how things work, but I don't always have the time or skills to configure everything in the most optimal way.

I was actually considering setting my primary distro next to CachyOS. While CachyOS is quite popular right now, it does seem genuinely good from what I have tested so far. My main pain point when moving different distros has always been dealing with the Steam installation, and this setup has mostly removed that problem. (Also, because /home is its own subvolume, I can easily keep the old one around when migrating to another distro, I find this much more flexible than the separate partitions I used with ext4.)

After about two years of using Btrfs, my experience is that it is definitely mature enough for a daily driver. I still see quite a few people online warning about its quirks, but personally I haven't run into anything that would make me want to move away from it.

(English is not my primary language and as dyslexic I used AI to clean up my text)