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
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.
That was only on RAID setups. So if you have only a singular disk, as opposed to an array, you’re fine. And that issue has been fixed for a while now anyways.
I’ve been running btrfs on my laptop’s root partition for well over a year now and it’s fine.
True true, I’m planning to go balls deep too since it have good raid capability
I get the feeling I’ll become a bcachefs fan for those reasons in the future (I tested it on a spare laptop as soon as 6.7 got into Debian Testing), but for now, I use a mix of ext4 and btrfs, as bcachefs-tools isn’t in Testing. It is trivial to apt-pin, but I try not to make FrankenDebian a regular thing. I have a feeling that they’ll iron it out and Bcachefs will be an option in Trixie by the tome it hits stable, if still with a /boot partition considering the slow state of Grub support.
I think Linux users must have some touch of masochism. Also this might interest you: https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-611-filesystems But me too, I’ve just installed Cosmic DE PopOS 24.04 for my main laptop.