I want to learn more about file systems from the practical point of view so I know what to expect, how to approach them and what experience positive or negative you had / have.
I found this wikipedia’s comparison but I want your hands-on views.
For now my mental list is
- NTFS - for some reason TVs on USB love these and also Windows + Linux can read and write this
- Ext4 - solid fs with journaling but Linux specific
- Btrfs - some modern fs with snapshot capability, Linux specific
- xfs - servers really like these as they are performant, Linux specific
- FAT32 - limited but recognizable everywhere
- exFAT - like FAT32 but less recognizable and less limited
Removed by mod
Ext4 cause that’s the default and I’m lazy.
Based
That’s a valid reason too. However sometimes btrfs has become the default ;)
Not in Mint.
Yeah I think Ubuntu and Debian based distro prefers it for stability reasons. Fedora I think switched to btrfs by default.
Removed by mod
deleted by creator
Why do you wipe your root dir?
Preventing unwanted state
If you install and then uninstall something, it will almost certainly leave logs, configurations and other garbage in places you don’t expect. Next time you want to use it, it isn’t the clean install you expected
ZFS for my server’s root pool and main storage pool. Ext4 with snapraid for my media pool. Currently btrfs on my desktop and ext4 under vanillaos on my laptop (not sure if I could partition it manually to use btrfs but I’m considering that for snapshots)
We use btrfs for the / partition and xfs for any data partitions. Has served us well, the snapshot feature saves us some valuable time when an update goes awry.
Why xfs let’s say over ext4? Just asking out of curosity.
The main distribution we use has it like that by default and our (admittedly rudimentary) benchmarks haven’t shown much of a performance difference versus ext4 so we kept to the default.
Google cloud storage, copilot my files with Microsoft, crowdstrike running in background for better security.
I wouldn’t be suprised if that’s the case for Windows users.
Apple chastity cage to prevent me from being tempted by Linux. /s
Xfs is solid Commenting b/c I’m disappointed no one else recommends
dual boot NixOS and FreeBSD on a single drive, ext4 on Nix and ZFS on FreeBSD. each partition has its own boot, swap and root, all encrypted
btw, OP wrote that FAT32 is limited, isn’t it the default fs for the boot partition? can other fs like ext2/3 be used?
ZFS on anything storage related. Enterprise level snapshot and replica management.
How’s it better than XFS? I heard same things about it too.
ZFS is completely different than XFS. XFS is like a better (different?) ext4. ZFS is an error-checking software raid COW filesystem that does snapshots and can have multiple replicas, both local and remote. It uses zvols and datastores. Think btrfs on steroids and with a working raid subsystem.
It’s got a weird semi-closed license because Oracle is involved but it’s never been enforced and at this point is in such widespread use in large and small enterprises that it would be impossible to enforce.
OpenZFS is under a completely FOSS license but it’s incompatible with the GPL and can’t really ever be merged into the Linux kernel. The workaroundids to provide it as source code which gets compiled as a module every time there’s a new kernel via dkms.
More controversially, Canonical ship OpenZFS pre-compiled in Ubuntu which some lawyers believe to be infringing on ZFS’ codebase.
Honestly the OpenZFS situation on Linux is probably the biggest single reason for the growing interest in btrfs and bcachefs, the former slowly becoming default on more Linux distros over time and lots of investment from SUSE and Facebook AFAIK.
XFS does not do snapshots, replicas, and all the other myriad of things that ZFS does.
I use BTRFS on my Artix system, Ext4 on my Librem 5, Ext4 on my Devuan laptop and Ext4 on my Pinebook Pro. Basically when given the choice in the installer I choose BTRFS but if the installer doesn’t let me pick I don’t care enough to manually partition. I have had no negative experiences with any file system luckily so I just roll with whatever.
ExFAT is the LCD filesystem for flash sticks. FAT32 is the filesystem that you have to use for devices designed before Microsoft was awful about Exfat licensing.
Everywhere else, Btrfs. If Oracle didn’t poison-pill ZFS licensing and it was common on Linux, I would be using that instead. Basically, taking it on faith that a drive didn’t fuck up your data is crazy. The most basic responsibility for a filesystem should be ensuring that “the files come out exactly the same as when they went in”.
Defaults
So Btrfs, ZFS and ext4 (ext4 is virtual only)
ext4 is virtual only?
Btrfs cause I’m limited on storage rn. So the compression saves me good amount of space.
Is there a way to tell how much space compresses? Would that be a game changer for instatlling games I wonder.
Yes. You need to install compsize . Wouldn’t call it a game changer but i only have 256gb ssd so it’s a life saver for me.
compsize -x /
It’s all Ext4, but I run SnapRAID on top of that on my data drives. I’m sure lots of people would tell me I should use ZFS/BTRFS instead, but I’m used to SnapRAID, and I like the idea if something goes wrong, I won’t lose all my data.
