Just a simple question : Which file system do you recommend for Linux? Ext4...?
EDIT : Thanks to everyone who commented, I think I will try btrfs on my root partition and keep ext4 for my home directory 😃
If you’re just doing a vanilla Linux install, ext4 is the way to go.
Upvoted. Not everyone wants to rely on backups and restore broken system every month like on BTRFS
File system is a core component of any electronic system. Even if it's just 1% less stable than other ones, it's still less stable. Maybe it's faster in some cases and supports better backups but ehh idk if it's worth it. Losing documents is something you probably want to avoid at all costs
Yeah, but it isn't noticeably "less stable" if at all anymore* unless you mean stable as in "essentially in maintenance mode", and clearly good enough for SLES to make it the default. Stop spreading outdated FUD and make backups regularly if you care about your documents (ext4 won't save you from disk failure either which is probably the more likely scenario).
* not talking about the RAID 5/6 modes, but those are explicitly marked unstable
Well gtk if it's really as stable as ext4. I will still stick to ext4 though because why change what already works well and tested on almost any machine you can possibly imagine?
Good that you mentioned that. Reminded me that I have an Arch Linux install here where I forgot that I did choose BTRFS during installation. Within maybe a month I noticed FS errors. Looked scary. Nervously searching for documentation was even more scary :
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/btrfs#btrfs_check ->
This article or section is out of date.(Discuss in Talk:Btrfs) Warning: Since Btrfs is under heavy development, especially the btrfs check command, it is highly recommended to create a backup and consult btrfs-check(8) before executing btrfs check with the --repair switch.What is this? My beloved Arch Wiki is not 100% perfect!
Then found this :
WARNING: Using '--repair' can further damage a filesystem instead of helping if it can't fix your particular issue.
Do not use --repair unless you are advised to do so by a developer or an experienced user, and then only after having accepted that no fsck successfully repair all types of filesystem corruption. E.g. some other software or hardware bugs can fatally damage a volume.
I figure this explains the popularity of BTRFS snapshot configurations. Luckily I had some backups :)
Filesystem snapshots won't help, if the filesystem itself corrupts. But I've been using BTRFS for 6 years now and haven't had a file system corruption, so mileage may obviously vary.
I'm going to go against the flow here and say BTRFS. It's stable enough to the point of being a non consideration. You get full backups using a negligible amount of storage. Even using it on Windows is easier than using ext4 with the winbtrfs driver.
Btrfs. Just format as one big partition (besides that little EFI partition of course) and don't worry about splitting up your disk into root and home. Put home on its own subvolume so that root can be rolled back separately from it. You can have automatic snapshots, low-overhead compression, deduplication, incremental backups. Any filesystem can fsck its own metadata, but btrfs is one of the few that also cares if your data is also intact.
ext4 has been battle-tested for many years and is very stable. Doesn't have the same fragmentation and data loss issues certain other filesystems like NTFS have.
Btrfs is cool because it supports snapshots, if you don't plan on using these, just go with ext4
Btrfs. It was the default filesystem already when I used Fedora on both my personal and work laptops. Not a single problem. It is true I don't really make much use of most of its advanced features like snapshotting, CoW, etc., but I also didn't notice any difference whatsoever in stability compared to ext4 so I'm pretty happy with it as my new default.
Ext4 for most home users, because it's simple and intuitive. Btrfs for anyone who has important data or wants to geek out about file systems. It's got some really cool features, but to actually use most of them you'll have to do some learning.
How about bcachefs. I'm waiting for it to support swapfiles, which seems to be in the TODO list, but so far doesn't work. If you use swap partition[s], or prefer not to have swap at all (I never fell for this, and besides swap is required for hibernation if that's a thing for you), then bcachefs is ready for you. It's already part of linux since 6.7, and on Artix, current linux is 6.8.9...
To me is the FS to use. I'm still on luks + ext4 (no LVM) and do entire home backups with plain rsync to an external device. I'd have to learn new stuff, since ext4 is really basic and easy to configure if in need, but I think bcachefs is worth it, and as mentioned, just waiting for it to support swapfiles, :)
Not yet, but bcachefs will be the future as the goals replicate most of OpenZFS while not having that licencing issue.
Thank you for sharing this. I didn't know this FS yet. It seems new and have some nice goals. I always have a grudge against zfs/btrfs because of the resource usage/performance.
I'll keep an eye on this. I'd love to find some benchmarks.
If you don't actually have an opinion, just go with the default, ext4 really is a very good file system, but if you want to have an opinion and not go with the default, zfs is truly a fantastic file system.
I would recommend using btrfs on SSDs and ext4 on hard drives.
So i normally go with ext4, however windows can't really access ext4 drives so you'd need to find a file system that both support if you want to access the drive/partition from windows. My drive with all the games is ntfs for example which works in Windows and Linux. (At least for normal storage, idk if you can boot linux from it although i wouldn't see why not)
Also taking f2fs for a spin.
As far as I have experienced (I didn't measure this): don't use that partition for container layers. It might just be my system, but f2fs has slowed my container engine down a bit.
I excactly doing this. I run coreOS with f2fs and it runs really fast. No issues so far.
Totally accepting it is my system being slow. It is a openwrt router after all.
I like btrfs but only cause it got transparent compression. I don't need the extra disk space and it only helps a bit but I just think it's neat
If you're on spinning rust with a modern CPU, compression actually helps your read/write speeds quite a bit. It's faster for the CPU to compress/decompress then read/write less data because hard drives are so slow in comparison.
ext4 for system partitions and zfs for anything dedicated to personal data storage.
I've always used XFS on spinning drives and F2FS on SSDs. No issues, they're very solid
