I’m trying to install Debian 13 (Trixie) with BTRFS configured to work with TimeShift. Because installing on a BTRFS filesystem apparently only gives you a @rootfs subvolume which is not only lame, but also incompatible with tools like TimeShift or Snapper.
I’ve been trying to set it up on Debian with very little success. I’ve followed some how-tos but keep ending up with a broken GRUB entry, or broken fstab or other bullshit. I’ve tried configuring it during installation with the non-graphical installer, or after installation is complete by creating and renaming subvolumes, moving files, etc. But it’s a such fucking chore. At least Ubuntu automated this and created all the subvolumes correctly.
I really want to be using Debian for it’s stability and also because I’ve become very used to the Debian apt package management system through Ubuntu. There seems to be a lot more documentation on Debian than OpenSUSE Tumbleweed also. But this BTRFS thing is a real challenge for me.
The layout I’m trying to use is the following:
@ - /
@home - /home
@var - /var
@tmp - /tmp
@swap - swap “partition”. (That’s how Ubuntu set it up)
@snapshots - /.snapshots (For Timeshift and btrfs-grub I think)
If you have any advice to give me on how to set this up with the least problems possible, please let me know.
I’ve been shopping around for my next Linux distro. I’m moving away from Ubuntu after having used it since it’s creation in 2004.
I think I might settle on Debian, but OpenSUSE Tumbleweed is really getting my attention.
I’m avoiding anything too bleeding edge because I want to minimize any problems. I don’t have any time to troubleshoot my PC. I just want something stable that works. So distros like Arch are out of the question.
Fedora seems to hit the sweet spot, but doesn’t have multimedia codecs out of the box or any easy way to install NVidia drivers out of the box either. Which I find ridiculous to be missing in a distro in 2026. I also hate how RedHat, the parent company, is also a genocide enabler by providing software and services to the Israeli government and their army. (Source1, source2) And they’re also an American company. So fuck 'em. Who knows what bullshit they’re about to add in their repos and how they’re going to manipulate their software packages.
There’s OpenSUSE Tumbleweed that seems very nice. Not quite bleeding edge, but on the edge at least. It’s got Snapper that takes snapshots before each update so you can roll-back via the grub menu which is really nice. But I find it has a LOT less community support and documentation than any other popular distros. And if you download an RPM for a 3rd party driver (like the printer for example) chances are there will be unmet dependencies because it was meant for Red Hat.
Then there’s Debian. Trusted. Stable. Community-led. A bit late, but 2 years ain’t that bad. It’s about the same with Ubuntu. More documentation. A bigger community. Compatible with Ubuntu for troubleshooting most of the time. But requires LOT more manual work to set it up.
Seriously, Debian needs to get up to speed in the user friendliness and usability department.
BTRFS doesn’t do case folding, meaning that it’s case sensitive by default. Proton uses win32 style file handling, which is case insensitive, that allows for file duplicates to be saved without it actually being detected by the native handler and also slows the entire file process down when there are a large amount of files. the steamdeck gets around that by forcing case folding on it’s storage but btrfs doesn’t support that.
It will work with most games OOB(with a light performance hit), but in the case of modding a game linux side, a developer miscodinga part on the linux side, either on the proton part or otherwise, or even just doing normal file operations outside of the wine environment, you can cause duplicate files that aren’t going to be seen as duplicates in the WINE layer which can cause conflicts and weird oddities. Some examples of this can be windows based mods on the steam workshop, as the steam client will interact with the manager as if its a linux client, meaning case sentitive, but when you launch the game it becomes case insensitive. if the mod isn’t developed with this in mind, it can save as different casing as it loads, which will error when you try to actually interact with it.
they have a github issue open for it still, but its been open for awhile now.