Linux Gaming

Btrfs will be fine, I use btrfs on a standard arch install, timeshift for managing snapshots, works well.

I use openSUSE Tumbleweed and it has BTRFS and snapper (snapshot manager) set up by default, with all necessary system subvolumes already created. It’s been a great experience for gaming so far, and actually the best experience with NVIDIA drivers I’ve had! All you would need to do is create a separate BTRFS subvolume and snapper config for your games folder and you’d be good to go, without worrying about any other setup! No need to use EXT4 at all. Additionally, there is very detailed snapper documentation on the openSUSE website.

https://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/leap/archive/15.0/reference/html/book.opensuse.reference/cha.snapper.html#id-1.4.3.4.2.2

Additionally, you can get support from the community in the openSUSE Matrix Space: https://matrix.to/#/%23space:opensuse.org

Use the support channel (#support:opensuse.org) or the gaming channel (#gaming:opensuse.org)

Just put steam on a different subvolume, otherwise your snapshots will be huge

Edit: to be clear, you can just put steamapps in a different subvolume keep the proton / save data folders in the snapshot area

I found that copying directories was much more convenient for this kind of experimentation, since I was usually already working in a filemanager anyways. And thanks to BTRFS's copy-on-write support it was also instantaneous and didn't take up any additional space. So in the end very similar to snapshots.

There's no reason btrfs shouldn't work for every use case.

That said I think the slight performance gains of ext4 over btrfs make it worth sticking to ext4 for games. Imo it's similar to as if you had you main system on an HDD but ran games off of an SSD; that's how much faster it feels.

I would install games to a separate ext4 partition but steam to btrfs (for configs) in that case.

To answer the direct question, BTRFS works fine for gaming. Garuda uses BTRFS by default and I've been daily driving it for a few years now. My gaming machine hasn't had an unrecoverable failure that wasn't my fault (not checking consple output for errors when updating and then rebooting). Games on an ext4 file system work fine - that's what I do for games I don't play often. The main NVME is for games that are played regularly and everything else goes to the storage SSDs.

Correct me if I'm wrong, it seems like you want an immutable distro more than BTRFS for what you want to do.

what filesystem you use to store your games on shouldn't matter. as long as the file system is able to store the files you need and supports the file permissions unix systems use it doesn't really matter.
i recall things like file management are a little faster on btrfs, but it has no impact on game performance or loading times for as far as i'm aware

I use BTRFS on root on openSUSE and it works fine. I don't interact with the snapshot feature much beyond system updates (and very rare rollbacks), but it's nice. I use an encrypted boot w/ an NVMe drive, and things work fine.

I'm not sure what the point of ext4 is for a system drive vs BTRFS, BTRFS on root has served me well for years (5-ish on my desktop, 7-ish on my NAS).

You can set up subvolumes and whatnot to snapshot just part of the tree as well. Or you can copy/paste the whole directory and run dedup (should work, haven't tried).

What do you mean splitting the disk? I just recently removed windows, moved and resized both boot and primary partition to take over all the space, now it is a pure Ext4 disk. I would not use BTRFS for your use case but that is up to you.

Timeshift