Are you a troll or something?

Quoting: CyrilAre you a troll or something?

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 January 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: 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.*

Mine cloks in at 21 GB, 24 GB with /var. And that includes kde and the full texlive and libreoffice distributions. Not exactly a lightweight installation.

You can always delete unused wineprefixes. For some games, saved games can take up several gigabytes. And can always use conty instead of flatpaks/whatever and manage your wine versions yourself. Maybe buy a hard drive for games. I think its the games that eat up your space.

Quoting: Craggles086

Quoting: CyrilAre you a troll or something?

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...

Quoting: damarrinIs it wasted space if it lets you game?

Exactly like it is wasted fuel if your car needs twice of it to lets you move.

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 January 2023 at 2:24 am UTC