I’m using Bazzite and Windows dual boot. I’m trying to figure out a better file system to be shared across both for gaming. I’m currently using NTFS. Is it worth the switching to BTRFS (without CoW) or Ext4? I would love to hear your thoughts. Thanks.
The only major file systems that are functionally stable and officially supported on Windows are NTFS and FAT32/exFAT. This is hopefully obvious.
I know ext4 can be mounted via WSL2 in Windows. Don’t know about btrfs.
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If that is working out for you, why change it?
You could go exFAT like @supremecleric suggested, I am just wondering why.
AFAIK supported in WSL2.
Wouldn’t recommend sharing a NTFS partition between OSes, the NTFS implementations on Linux are nowhere near mature yet and likely never will be. High risk of data loss.
BTRFS no. Go with ext4, especially for gaming.
Don’t dual boot. Windows will wipe the Linux partition during a update someday.
Use two SSDs instead.
To share data between, build a (Samba) NAS.
+1 more for exFAT. File copy to ext4 partitions using WSL2 was unacceptably slow.
I’m having both the OS in seperate SSDs, and games in combination of SSD and HDD seperate from the one used for OS. I got the media and files covered as you suggested I have a samba share for them.
I’m trying to do something optimal for the gaming side. I tried WinBTRFS in windows and though there were few frame drops compared to NTFS, it was do able. Though I’m not sure if it is reliable in long run. I haven’t tried ext4 in windows yet. May be I will try it over the weekend.
If I disable copy on write that slows BTRFS down, do you think it would be comparable to ext4? And which format do you think is more stable in long run on windows?
NTFS is just not good for linux in long run. Especially with windows randomly locking out the storage even with Hibernate shutdown turned off. I’m not sure about exFat as it is more optimized for portable drives. But will do some benchmark on that.
I suggested exFat because it’s well understood, stable and safe in both Linux and Windows. Whatever optimisations you think it has, do they stop it from being useful in your circumstances?
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Imho exfat is the only fs you can use reliably. Native full support on both windos and lunix. Anything else and you are relying on partial support from reverse engineering or compatibiliy layers.
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NTFS in Linux is a mess.
I’ve had entire partitions get corrupted repeatedly in the past few months because I had to reboot and didn’t notice Steam was updating stuff in the background.
Had to use testdisk to fix the main partition on one of my 4TB NVMe drives twice in 1 week. Finally just gave up, spent 2 days transferring everything to a mechanical drive and went with BTRFS for everything.
Wouldn’t recommend it to anyone unless it’s absolutely necessary and you have backups of everything on them.
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It goes the other way around too. Do not use Linux filesystems on Windows either. Unless paravirtualized through WSL2 where it’s actually the Linux kernel doing the stuff.
BTRFS is more server oriented, it is impractical for most desktop usage. Maybe for atomic OSes like Silverblue that integrate with BTRFS snapshots, other than that, no; too impractical and not tuned for desktops by default (= high interactivity, 1 disk).
Just don’t, simple as that. It’ll save you headache down the road.
Install the games you play on Linux on a Linux filesystem and ones that are Windows exclusive for whatever reason on the NTFS drive.
Wine/Proton regularly have issues with starting games from NTFS drives for a number of reasons, first and foremost because they aren’t tested for it.
Well that and as mentioned above the NTFS implementation is functional for some things, but not intended for extended use. Things can and will go wrong eventually.
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Here is what I did, use a VM(qemu worked well for me, if you don’t mind writing a bat file) to boot into Bazzite while running Windows. Then share the drive via samba.
Fwiw there is a new ntfs driver in linux 7.1 so ntfs may become a viable option in the not-too-distant future.
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