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 😃

  • Mereo
    46·
    7 months 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@slrpnk.net
      54·
      7 months ago

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

      • Eager Eagle@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        7 months 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@slrpnk.net
          1·
          7 months 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@slrpnk.net
          1·
          7 months 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@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            7 months 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@slrpnk.net
              1·
              7 months 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.

    • acockworkorange@mander.xyz
      11·
      7 months 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.

    • xor@infosec.pub
      12·
      7 months ago

      (you can also usually just boot into safe mode and fix it)
      (source: i have broken and fixed mine 10,000x with no backups)

      • Mereo
        2·
        7 months ago

        I don’t have that sort of time. A snapshot let’s me get back running in no time.