May 6, 2026, 1:51 PMDoes anyone have experience with using filesystem compression on laptops? Personally, I'm thinking of running BTRFS with zstd compression on mine, but I'm kind of wondering if it would be bad for battery life.
- May 6, 2026, 1:51 PM
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d@nny disc@hipsterelectron@circumstances.runMay 6, 2026, 2:35 PM@boo_ zstd can be improved
- May 6, 2026, 2:52 PM
Implementation-wise, conceptually, or is there any choice of compression algo for this that would be better in some form?
May 6, 2026, 4:04 PM@boo_ i use debian 13 i configured with subvolumes and zstd myself, compression goes to the default level (3).
honestly i don't remember how it was like before i did that, i've been using this setup for a while, and my hardware is fairly modern so it might just be dealing better with it. i can say that i am very well statisfied with performance and battery life in general, and it seems to align well with the reported battery life from others. but for older machines, sorry but i got no idea. someone more knowledgable than me can probably speak on this. testing this SHOULD be easy, theoretically, but i don't have old hardware.
and at least according to the docs, levels 0-3 are balanced enough between cpu time and compression: https://btrfs.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Compression.html#compression-levels
i can speak on compression ratios for level 3, though. ~70% across the whole system i think? the "none" in my home directory are (what i very much believe to be) steam games and media/archives, which are uncompressable from what i've read. the rest of my subvolumes are negligible (logs are already compressed gz archives so no btrfs compression happens, the rest are practically empty)
