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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Every year I buy a couple ~$5 USB drives and plug them into my jbod machine in a software raid1. At this point there's about a hundred in long array of daisy chained USB hubs.
Each drive is formatted with fat32 and added to an LVM. Don't judge my ghetto NAS.
Amazing shitpost
Ext4 and ZFS.
syncoid -r rpool backup-server:machine4-rpool.Thank you little amoeba 🦠
biased random walk dance
ZFS where possible for maximum reliability
It also has self healing, no "partitions", high performance, compression, smart drive redundancy without RAID holes, encryption, deduplication and an extremery intelligent cache called ARC
ZFS is completely ridiculous. It's like someone actually sat down to design an intelligent filesystem instead of making a slightly improved version of what's already out there.
ext4 because its the default and works fine
Never doubted it. Do you use journaling feature on it?
I like ext4 because it's easy. If anything breaks, ANY live USB can fix it. I use fat32 for my removeable drives, because anything can read it. I don't use journalling for anything manually, but I imagine it's useful when my disk crashes because I let my laptop die
Wasn't that the entire purpose of ext4 vs ext3? As the default, I also keep journaling on for ext4 partitions. Even /boot.
Not only is there btrfs support for Windows, but since windows and linux root structures don't conflict, someone got both arch and windows booting from the same partition. Is it a good idea? Hell no. But can it be done? Apparently yes.
BTRFS raid on LUKS-encrypted devices (no LVM, all unlocked with one password via SystemD encrypt hooks).
Ext4 for everything when possible, because its reliable and proven. I'm looking towards Btrfs for my next system drive, as it is mature now and has good features. But I would use Ext4 for everything else still. For interoperability that doesn't understand Ext4 it would be NTFS when supported, otherwise fallback to FAT32.
That's the entirety of my knowledge and what I use when I have to format it myself. :D
Btrfs for everything these days, subvolume snapshots have been game-changing for me for doing backups.
Just ext4 on my Linux things; I got scared away from btrfs because of some file loss horror stories
I care a lot about filesystems.
BTRFS in FS-managed RAID configuration for automatic self-healing and snapshots for instant automated backups (though I keep a traditional backup too for protection against bugs and user error).
Storage is cheap compared to how much I value my data. BTRFS has very good support on Linux, integration with some backup tools, and I really want to use a FS that has full data checksums to make sure the data stays correct at rest. I like that I don’t have to use equal sized drives and can use whatever I have available, though I would appreciate a better read distribution model rather than the current where it just chooses a random drive to read from when multiple copies are available.
Disadvantages include difficulty accessing from Windows in my experience, less than stellar performance on HDDs, not very space efficient for small files systems because of the bulky metadata, and some uncommon RAID types don’t work correctly and will eat your data. I also don’t recommend it for use over USB because many such devices don’t correctly implement sync, and this is very important to stay on the correct transaction number and prevent file system inconsistencies. If I had to boot from USB, I wouldn’t pick BTRFS.
I don’t think exFAT or FAT32 offer POSIX permissions. I’m not sure if you could have a root file system there.
Btrfs, for the compression and CoW. I've been using it since a couple years. It seems stable for my use. I need to fully wrap my head around how snapshots work, though.
You mentioned CoW. I’m really taking advantage of this because I have multiple Wine prefixes that have lots of duplicate data. I want to give every application it’s own prefix, and my underlying file system allows me to duplicate the blocks so the prefixes are basically free where before it’s several hundred megabytes just to make a new prefix.
ZFS all the things. On my workstations, I wipe / on every boot except for the files that I specify, and I backup /home to my NAS on ZFS and I backup my NAS snapshots to Backblaze.
Ext4 on every Linux device.
Ah i dont have any other kind of devices (android on mobile, but there I have no choices on fs)
Why not btrfs? Don't know, been using what has kept working flawlessly for me for the last 20+ years, no need to replace ext4.
I use BTRFS for the snapshot and subvolume tools.
It is pretty good but usability is a mixed bag. Always getting better by the month though, it feels like.
NTFS support is pretty solid on Linux these days, but just so you know, never use it as a root partition.
I have generally used ext4. There's ways to massage it to mount on Windows, as with btrfs. Ext4 is very likely what you should do if you're installing Linux for the first time, as it has had decades of testing and is rather battle-tested
I recently did my first btrfs install. For now, I've had no issues. Of course, some could happen, but I've generally heard btrfs is fine these days. One of its cool things is native compression support, although I forgot to enable it when I did that install.
I've never used XFS.
FAT32 should be rarely used these days due to file size limits and file name limits. The only place where it should still be used is for your EFI partition.
Now exFAT really isn't that unrecognizable. It's supported by pretty much every operating system these days. It's definitely not for root partitions, but should be your default for flash drives and portable hard drives.
On another note, I recently tried Bcachefs on Debian Testing on a random old Chromebook. It is still in development, and not all distros support it yet, but I liked what I saw from my limited experience. It also supports snapshots, and unlike btrfs, has native encryption. For now, just ignore it, but like many in this post have said, keep an eye out for it.
As for ZFS, I've never tried it. The main caveat is due to licensing incompatibility, it is not in the standard Linux kernel and you have to do some special stuff.
Ext4 is the only good FS so that's what I use.
Many different file systems are successfully used in production on a large scale that aren’t EXT4.
Honestly I saw btrfs in the arch install guide and read about it because I thought the name sounded funny. I used it until I distro hopped to NixOS couldn't figure out how to install it with btrfs, so I'm back on ext4.
Maybe I'll give it another try next hop, which is likely soon since Qt theming seems impossible on Nix. :/
Ext4 with LVM.
I like BTRFS and it's features but sadly Debian doesn't have a preset for it in it's installer so the only way to use it is to manually partition and I absolutely suck at that.
ExFAT is the LCD filesystem for flash sticks. FAT32 is the filesystem that you have to use for devices designed back when 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".
ZFS for nearly everything plus ZFSBootMenu EFI on root data pools. Get a bad upgrade? No problem, boot a previous snapshot (auto created with a pacman hook), which I had to do recently when 6.6.39 LTS kernel had a bug. Snapshots are also great when doing things such as upgrading postgres, hass, Plex, etc.
I've been using ZFS now for a few years for all my data drives/pools but I haven't gotten brave enough to boot from it yet. Snapshotting a system drive would be really handy.
I use ext4 for all boot drives and root filesystems. Anything really important goes on a ZFS array. And for my Linux isos, I use a drive with ext4 + snapraid. The parity drive has xfs because ext4 has a 16tb file size limit.
Got rid of anything NTFS as it was unreliable and slow on Linux.
I am now all-in on bcachefs. I don't like btrfs, cause you still sometimes read about people loosing their data. I know that might happen with bcachefs too since it's early days still but fuck it. I like the risk.
Filesystem level compression and encryption are so nice to have.
Ext4 bc of its speed for games and my main files. Btrfs on the root for compression
A combination of XFS and ZFS. I work in high performance computing (academic). While I love the reliability of ZFS for data archival and peace of mind that results provably haven’t suffered bitrot, sometimes I just need a 10 TB temp file(s) with fast mostly-sequential R/W. Appropriate selection of file systems lets me have both.
As an aside, I’ve been watching bcachefs with some interest, as it seems to be getting faster with every kernel release, building on the data integrity guarantees of ZFS while pushing performance boundaries and being GPL compatible (i.e. in tree). Kent Overstreet et al. have done a fantastic job with this FS.
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.
Btrfs main boot drive
Xfs main storage drive
exFAT external "archive" drive (easy to connect to Windows machines if ever I need my backup in someone else's windows machine in an emergency and such)
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.
I've been basically using btrfs on a lot of my disks because of the features it has.
Before I switched to a borg based system, my backups partition used btrfs for compression.
My main OS disk is btrfs so I can use timeshift snapshots, which are really worth checking out if you tinker with your system a lot.
I have two more btrfs partitions software raid0'd together for my steam library, nix store and other big but loosable things.
And my main home folder uses btrfs because I think the checksumming thing it does is more reliable for error detection, and cow is more fault tollerant on power failure?
... And I now fell like I'm one of those people with an over engineered storage solution. I just never get rid of old ssds or hard disks!
ext4, but the btrfs activity visible in the kernel changelog has slowed down recently after a long period of many bug fixes, so maybe I'll give it a try next time.