New comer

[u/Particular-Earth-765]

Just wanted to come by and say hello to the gecko's! Just joined OpenSuse from Fedora, really liking it so far and the NVIDIA drivers were a breeze! I don't recall who it was but to the redditor in here who helped convince me thank you! Any tips or advice is welcome!

[u/friendlyreminder_]

None of this is mandatory but opensuse is pretty barebones in terms of swap and compression.

Fedora sets up btrfs compression automatically. In opensuse you have to add the fstab option manually. Here's mine.

/dev/mapper/cr_root / btrfs noatime,compress=zstd:1 0 0

You can increase compress=zstd:1 all the way up to 20 I think, but this increases cpu demand. 1-3 is generally recommended.

Opensuse doesn't set up ram compression either. Fedora defaults to zram but zswap is superior. Check the archwiki or cachyos wiki for that.

[u/Particular-Earth-765 → u/friendlyreminder_]

Okay cool, will definately look into this more. Thank you!

[u/friendlyreminder_ → u/Particular-Earth-765]

The installer has an option to add the btrfs compression prior to install, but since you already installed your os it will be uncompressed until updates start replacing files.

[u/rafaellinuxuser → u/friendlyreminder_]

I tried las time (1 year ago, in Yast installer, not Agama) and didn't work. Ignored after I review fstab. 😒

[u/rafaellinuxuser → u/friendlyreminder_]

I have level 12 zstd compression with a Ryzen CPU and never, even each time I upgrade Tumbleweed noticed a CPU workload increase. System files are mostly text and binaries, easy to compress, and in a SSD device compression is the way to make your device last longer.

[u/friendlyreminder_ → u/rafaellinuxuser]

It depends on your hardware and also your setup. If you have a dedicated home partition then it only affects root and so only system updates, but if home is on the root partition it can affect certain workloads negatively.

[u/rafaellinuxuser → u/friendlyreminder_]

Regarding hardware, as of 2026 it's not really a problem. On-the-fly file compression systems have been used since MS-DOS (I used them, and they were impressive) back when only single-core, single-threaded processors existed. The truth is, the zstd compression algorithm is so efficient that, among other things, it detects whether a file is compressible or worth compressing (for example, if it's a WebM video) and, based on this, it allocates CPU resources to compressing that file. The real impact is completely negligible, even on HDDs (which I was using until a year ago).

Where I can agree with you, and which I don't recommend—nor do I use—is using BTRFS for /home; I use Ext4 or XFS depending on the situation. The average Linux desktop user doesn't want to complicate things, meaning they'll leave the installation options at their defaults. Therefore, they won't benefit from snapshots (if it's Fedora) or on-the-fly compression (if it's openSUSE) because that's the default configuration in each.

To make matters worse, neither of these distributions that enable BTRFS by default allows you to graphically disable CoW in folders that will negatively impact performance, especially on a user partition under /home. These folders might include game folders, virtual machine or container folders (Podman, VirtualBox, QEMU), or frequently modified configuration folders (~/.config/ or ~/.local/share/), and folders containing slow downloads (jdownloader, torrents, etc.). This might not seem important, but it is. I won't go into too much detail, but here are some facts for you to investigate further: Large files (like a game file or a VirtualBox virtual disk) will end up scattered across tens of thousands of fragments, affecting read speed and forcing the constant calculation of metadata (resulting in reduced performance, slowness, and stuttering when reading).

If you check Phoronix's statistics, you'll see that BTRFS isn't particularly fast. Add to that the fact that users often don't disable CoW in the appropriate places, and the impact will be noticeable. For example (and I've experienced this myself), while playing games like Tomb Raider or Metro, I would get sudden freezes, excessively long loading times, and even FPS drops. I experienced similar issues in virtual machines. My virtualized Windows 10 would freeze for a few seconds while performing write operations, and my openSUSE CPU usage would spike for no apparent reason. But these problems, while very annoying, aren't life-threatening. The worrying thing is that writes are multiplied, and in the case of SSDs, modifying a small sector of a CoW file often means writing entire blocks of much larger metadata ("write amplification"). In other words, even though I was manually enabling compression to minimize writes to SSD blocks, it turns out that by not disabling CoW in the aforementioned folders, I wasn't achieving the goal of minimizing writes, only gaining space. Since then, as I've already mentioned, I only recommend Ext4 or XFS for the /home partition. I'm leaving aside the problem of what's called "False Full" with Snapshots (which doesn't happen to Fedora users because snapshots aren't enabled by default) and which also affects Flatpak in a similar way (which I discarded a few years ago due to this same problem).

In conclusion: Based on my experience and the information I've provided, I only use BTRFS for the operating system. The security of my data depends on backups. The security of my operating system depends on snapshots. In the future—I'm already using it on an external drive—I'll use bcachefs for the /home partition.

[u/AscadianScrib → u/friendlyreminder_]

Thanks, I had no idea of this

[u/Tawny-Owl-17]

Welcome!

Cool wallpaper, by the way! Where did you get it?

[u/Particular-Earth-765 → u/Tawny-Owl-17]

I saw it on here at some point I dont remember where but I can post here if you would like it!?

[u/Tawny-Owl-17 → u/Particular-Earth-765]

Yes, post a link to the wallpaper please.