Advice Request Which Linux File System during installation

Share practical recommendations that address the author's needs.
I tried BTRFS a couple times, and it has some cool features, but I strongly recommend using the ext file format. It makes troubleshooting and backups so much easier. Better software compatibility, too. Also encrypting is easier. Even if I would install a distro that uses BTRFS by default, such as Fedora or Garuda, I would opt for Ext.
 
I normally just use ext4 never had any major issues with it even if the system locks up and have to pull the power cord.

Can't say the same last when I used xfs on a system a unexpected power loss caused data corruption to the points where fsck couldn't fix it so couldn't mount the FS, saying that it was like 5+ years ago so xfs is probably more stable nowadays.
 
Soulbound said:
Thats the thing i have one in Butter one in Ext 4 trying to weight out if i really need butter.
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Butter is great for instant backups like @Numeriku said. But those snapshots are saving on the system partition. So if the system partition goes bad, your backups went bad, too.
I also found Butter to be a real pain to chroot into. I could never get that to work.
 
shmu26 said:
Butter is great for instant backups like @Numeriku said. But those snapshots are saving on the system partition. So if the system partition goes bad, your backups went bad, too.
I also found Butter to be a real pain to chroot into. I could never get that to work.
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Didn't try it yet but does not butter have built-in raid options, instead of the default raid 0, with 2 disks he can technically have raid 1 setup but I suspect @Soulbound wants to make full use of his two disks.
 
EXT4 is still the most widely used and still works quite well. I use Fedora which comes with BTRFS and have not experienced any issues personally. BTRFS has some great features, but it's most popular one is the built in ability to take system snapshots, so you can restore the system from a previous state in case of an issue. Gotcha with it, is you need to ensure you have the proper sub volumes created and a backup software such as Timeshift to really use the snapshot feature. If you want to use BTRFS, use a distro that sets it up for you, unless you have experience doing so, if not, just use EXT4.;)

Numeriku said:
Didn't try it yet but does not butter have built-in raid options, instead of the default raid 0, with 2 disks he can technically have raid 1 setup but I suspect @Soulbound wants to make full use of his two disks.
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It does have raid capabilities, however it is recommended not to go beyond a raid 0, or 1 atm. While it can technically do a raid 5, 6. etc...there are some issues currently with the BTRFS file-system going beyond a raid 0/1. I believe they are trying to rectify the issues, but it still is a work in progress if I am not mistaken.
 
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System with Butter has built in software for it, unless I manually added but I can be wrong.
Yeah i know butter and its QoL for backups but at the same time its where it is stored, granted both linux systems are just for casual use, but still a pain to maintain at times. Had that with a kernel upgrade but then switched back to LTS kernel and been fine.

Its a laptop, so raid is out of option. Ill do a full clean install of both systems and use Ext4. Theres one thing I didnt share between both systems and honestly is more work to do it now than if I was to clean install again.

For those interested in which distros, its here in this post, albeit I might streamline a little bit more.

Systems
 
IMO you should stick with ext4 unless there is a specific reason why ext4 isn't suitable for your use case. ext4 is still the most supported, most stable, and has the most tools around it for your needs.

Btrfs is promising and great if you depend on certain features only it provides. For example, snapshots are tightly integrated with some distributions like OpenSUSE Tumbleweed to provide fast rollbacks in case your nightly build is a bust. Its transparent compression is also great if you're space constrained. But it still has yet to stabilize despite 10+ years of wishing it did -- the behavior under near-disk-full conditions is still odd at best, and it can corrupt itself for no good reason.

XFS is really great for working with extremely large files. But it is much more unforgiving to situations like hard shutdowns, or SSDs that lie about data being committed. Corruption to XFS disks tend to result in massive data loss, while corruption to ext4 tends to isolate itself to single files or at worst a directory. But if you're working with a ton of large media, XFS could be a worthwhile choice.

Reiserfs has lost almost all of its appeal compared to its golden days, but one thing it still excels at is extremely fast metadata operations, especially deletion of large folder trees. I still use reiserfs for build servers where creating and deleting large chroots is a common use case. Other than that, I don't really recommend it for much.
 
@MacDefender is correct. Unless there is a specific need for features not offered by ext4, for stability and reliability it is best to just stick with ext4.
 
I use BTRFS on desktops and ext4 on servers. Desktops benefit from easy snapshotting / rollbacks, but for servers I'm installing a proper backup system anyway.
 

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