Install Kubuntu with zstd compression initially

[jlittle]

Today I was testing a new storage device (a Crucial 1 TB NVMe, 5x the read and write of my 7 year-old SATA SSD) and to make sure I could boot from it I did Lunar installs. I want to use zstd compression, and searches on how to do this from the beginning at install time could only find advice to do the install, turn on compression in /etc/fstab, restart or remount, and use btrfs defrag to rewrite every file.

However, I've found that by creating the btrfs before installing, mounting it somewhere, say /mnt/newvol, and running

cd /mnt/newvol
sudo btrfs property set . compression zstd

and unmounting, the kubuntu installer with manual partition set up, did the install with zstd compression. It only saves about 30% of the space on root.

[jfabernathy]

What I do on fresh installs of Kubuntu, ubuntu with legacy installer, or Mint is just select btrfs in the manual partitioning and install with defaults, As soon as I've installed and updated to latest packages, I edit /etc/fstab and change the mounting options to:

defaults,noatime,compress=zstd,subvol=@

I do the same for any other subvolume.

After that I just run

sudo btrfs fi defragment -r -czstd /

That compressed my system to about 50% of what I started with, using df -h to compare