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.
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.
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.
But you can also just use BTRFS without any fancy setup and not use its features, it will still be faster.
Btrfs has many advantages over ext4, but being faster isn’t one of them.
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.
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.
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.
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.