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 😃

  • @[email protected]
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    471 year ago

    In my opinion, it depends. If a distro has BTRFS configured to automatically take a snapshot when upgrading (like OpenSuse Tumbleweed), then BTRFS.

    If not, for a beginner, ext4 + timeshift to take snapshots of your system in case an upgrade goes wrong will be fine.

    • boredsquirrel
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      41 year ago

      But you can also just use BTRFS without any fancy setup and not use its features, it will still be faster.

      • Eager Eagle
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        1 year ago

        Btrfs is slower than ext4, xfs, and f2fs in pretty much every metric. Noticeably slower app opening times is the reason I switched to F2FS for good.

        • boredsquirrel
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          11 year ago

          Very interesting. I heard F2FS has no journalling, but afaik Fedora Atomic doesnt rely on it?

          It might be worth looking into, as it beat many tests.

        • boredsquirrel
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          11 year ago

          Edit: BTRFS has advantages that likely make it better for me.

          It has compression and allows flexible partition sizes. The compression may explain the speed decreases.

          • Eager Eagle
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            11 year ago

            Compression might be useful in some cases, but the bulk of my data is already compressed or not much compressible (think videos, images, compressed archives, game assets). So the trade off doesn’t make much sense to me.

            • boredsquirrel
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              11 year ago

              That is true, not for Flatpaks but for sure.

              I wonder how much of a pain it would be not having BTRFS subvolumes on atomic Fedora. Will try F2FS in a VM.

    • @[email protected]
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      11 year ago

      Mint doesn’t default to btrfs, but will use it if you so choose during install. And it integrates fantastically with Timeshift. I’ve set up daily and weekly snapshots and have peace of mind.

  • @[email protected]
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    351 year ago

    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.

    • Possibly linux
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      11 year ago

      Until you pull the power at the wrong time. Its better to use Btrfs as others have said.

      • @[email protected]
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        31 year ago

        But pulling the power on a btrfs drive at the wrong time results in you not even being able to mount it as read only. No snapshotting can help you there.

  • Yozul
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    351 year ago

    Honestly, unless there’s some specific thing you’re looking for just use your distro’s default. If your distro doesn’t have a default I’d probably default to ext4. The way most people use their computers there’s really no noticeable advantage to any of the others, so there’s no reason not to stick with old reliable. If you like to fiddle with things just to see what they can do or have unusual requirements then btrfs or zfs could be worth looking into, but if you have to ask it probably doesn’t matter.

  • @[email protected]
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    291 year ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
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      21 year ago

      It cares so much that when it goes wrong you can’t even mount the partitions as readonly to try get your data back. It will stubbornly hold on to it and refuse any access at all. Boy I am so glad it didn’t let me access a potentially corrupted byte somewhere!

  • ta00000 [none/use name]
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    261 year ago

    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.

    • Possibly linux
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      11 year ago

      Be really careful with winbtrfs. It will corrupt your data and cause crashes. Also I feel bad for the dev as Windows users are very demanding

    • @[email protected]
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      51 year ago

      Especially just getting into linux. Ext4 works well enough, when you learn enough to care about what it doesn’t do well try something then

  • @[email protected]
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    231 year ago

    As someone who ran BTRFS for years, I’m personally switching back to EXT4. Yes, the compression and other features are nice, but when things go wrong and you have to do a recovery, it’s not worth the complexity

    • Possibly linux
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      141 year ago

      I’ve found it much easier and way more reliable. If I pull out the power on ext4 it is likely to cause corruption and sometimes you can’t fix it.

      Btrfs is pretty much impossible to completely corrupt. I’ve had drives fail and I didn’t lose anything

      • @[email protected]
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        271 year ago

        Lemme say this - While complex, I can vouch for recovering files on BTRFS. I can’t vouch for recovering files on ext4, because I never had to.

      • @[email protected]
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        91 year ago

        When booting into a live CD, mounting the various subpartitions is super annoying.

        When your disk space hits full, things break uncontrollably because different programs don’t have a consistent measurement of how much space is left.

        When shrinking partitions, you can lose data if you shrink it too much. I’m not talking about forced overrides of any configs, I’m talking about things like KDE Partition Manager.

        All of these things can be excused one way or another, but at the end of the day I just want a stable filesystem that doesn’t lose my docs.

        • @[email protected]
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          41 year ago

          Ah yes, the free space calculation stuff is still a mess.

          Overall, I’ve been daily-driving btrfs on some system and it’s been treating me well. But yeah, they still got a long way to go.

  • @[email protected]
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    181 year ago

    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.

  • @[email protected]
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    181 year ago

    btrfs every day of the week. The only scenario where I’d even consider something else is for databases that would suffer from CoW.

    I’ve been running it on my home server since 2010. The same array has grown from 6x2TB to 6x4TB, one disk at a time as they’ve failed. Currently sitting at 2x18TB+1x4TB. No data loss even though many drives have failed.

  • @[email protected]
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    151 year ago

    I personally use ext4 everywhere but it is recommend to have BTRFS for your OS partition if you take snapshots often.

    • caseyweederman
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      41 year ago

      Ok but please explain subvolumes, the information has failed to latch onto my brain

      • @[email protected]
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        41 year ago

        Subvolumes are somewhat like a partition, but they don’t have fixed size. What they allow you to do is take snapshots. Snapshots are used to backup and restore the subvolume. They can be created instantly and don’t take up any space until something is changed.

        • caseyweederman
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          21 year ago

          If I’m trying to install Linux with BTRFS, and it doesn’t work, what are some of the most likely mistakes I’ve made?

          • @[email protected]
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            31 year ago

            What distro? Some installers will set everything up for you and others you have to setup subvolumes manually.

  • @[email protected]
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    1 year ago

    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, :)

    • @[email protected]
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      21 year ago

      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.

    • @[email protected]
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      11 year ago

      Not yet, but bcachefs will be the future as the goals replicate most of OpenZFS while not having that licencing issue.

  • @[email protected]
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    131 year ago

    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.