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Comment by xvector | Hacker News Reader

Why is it not the default? Compatibility issues with Windows games somehow?

BTRFS is probably mature and stable by now, but it's been a rocky road with several premature declarations of maturity.

I can only speculate Valve's reasoning, but there are a very select few games that require actual case folding and not the simulated case folding that wine offers. I know of literally only one.

Can you help me with some searchable terms for learning about case folding? Is that something specific to games? Specific to disk formats?

It's a file system feature, all it means to be case folding is that capital and non-capital letters are treated the same, as NTFS does.

All Linux filesystems will by default allow "TEST" and "test" and "Test" to exist in the same folder, which no Windows application is ever intended to handle. Wine works around this by default.

NTFS is also case sensitive, however case folding is done at search time according to default windows settings.

Windows apps are expected to handle case sensitivity gracefully in non-FAT filesystems.

SteamOS dev here - lack of case folding is one (but solvable, we supported development on native case folding for ext4), but general stability issues are the main concern. Our testing with btrfs has not been promising for deploying it in a zero-maintenance manner to many users and finnicky SD cards and have it Just Work, but we're keeping an eye on things and weighing where we could contribute.

Is there a way for adventurous users to opt into using BTRFS on SD cards?

https://gitlab.com/popsulfr/steamos-btrfs

Have you done any performance testing with btrfs compression?

I have a Legion Go. I don't have the specs handy now, but the SSD was rated fast enough that I suspected compression would harm my overall performance.

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