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.
If you have a fast CPU adding compression can actually improve performance. https://www.phoronix.com/review/btrfs-zstd-compress
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.
with fast nvme not that much… not like the ‘olden days’ of msdos and stacker where it was actually noticeable on some systems.