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 😃
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Wsl2 lets windows do ext4
There’s also an open source BTRFS driver for Windows.
I don’t know what’s the brand neW meta pick, but at least BTRFS over Ext4. BTRFS is just more stable and less corruptable than Ext4. Heck, fedora changed to it as default
To be fair, Fedora switching to something as default isn’t a good sign that you should start using it. I do agree, though, btrfs has come far enough to be a default choice for most people.
What did fedora adopt that wasn’t a good choice in hindsight?
PulseAudio?
Ext4 is, afaik, the fastest as it’s the most understood
Btrfs has compression and you can make snapshots to roll back to if something goes wrong (not necessary on immutable distros or NixOS tho)
There are many other options, but I’ve only ever had a need for those two
btrfs snapshots are still useful on immutable distros to recover accidentally deleted data.
True, but with files, you really benefit from the speed that ext4 provides
BTRFS &/OR EXT4
I personally use ext4 everywhere but it is recommend to have BTRFS for your OS partition if you take snapshots often.
Btrfs or XFS.
No idea why people are into EXT4. XFS is more performant by far.
No love for bcachefs?
Uff, somehow missed your post. See mine. That’s the FS I’m hoping to use next. I’m waiting for it to support swapfile, or alternatively read from official sources they won’t ever support it, :). But yes, that’s the one I’m looking forward to use.
I’ve been very happy with btrfs. Ext4 is basically rock solid, so you can’t really go wrong with it, but btrfs has some nice features that ext4 doesn’t have, like snapshots. And it’s fast. I have an extremely cheap SSD that’s too slow to run anything with ext4, but actually usable with btrfs.
btrfs is objectively slower than ext4. It is CoW and maintains more complex metadata.
Only situations it wins is when lots of copies are made at once. Not a super common workflow compared to writes imo.
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
I prefer ext4 on HDD and f2fs on flash devices.
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.
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For interoperability, yes. But with flash devices I mean ssd and nvme.
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, :)
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.
I prefer using ext4 for stability. But if stability doesn’t matter to you, you should use BTRFS.
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.
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.
Well since so many people recommend btrfs because “it have never lost any data for me”. I want to suggest OP to never use btrfs ever. Because it has lost my data, at least three separate times, the most recent time a week ago. And it’s not because of a power loss or anything, it just corrupted my files for absolutely no reason at all.
Stay away from btrfs at all costs.
