edit 2: Found a video by “SpaceRex” on the differences between BTRFS and EXT4, super helpful! He explained it quite well…

edit: It seems that there isn’t much difference between btrfs and ext4 aside from additional features of btrfs, which although I might not need right now, there doesn’t seem to be any harm in using btrfs over ext4, so I will be using btrfs.

Which would be better? Fedora shipped with btrfs, does it have any additional features that are good (quick search shows compression, subvolumes, and snapshots as main selling points for btrfs, but are there any downsides?

  • bestboyfriendintheworld@sh.itjust.works
    2·
    1 day ago

    BTFS snapshots are such a huge improvement and a live saver if you like to tinker on your system. Also great for backups, which you should make. Use snapper and similar tools.

    I’d only recommend ext* for spinning hard drives. For ancient slow machines, go with XFS or ReiserFS (if any distro still supports that even).

  • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    251·
    3 days ago

    These days there isn’t really any reason to avoid btrfs. It’s stable, and has a lot of nice features.

    • Zikeji@programming.devEnglish
      51·
      3 days ago

      Agreed. Even if you don’t need the features right now, you might in the future. Also, using snapshots as a filesystem level time machine is nice and I highly recommend them. There’s Snapper and Timeshift.

      • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        141·
        3 days ago

        I will say, if you’re a newbie, then btrfs has one big benefit, especially when combined with Grub or Limine as your boot loader, and that is the ability to just roll back to a previous snapshot when something breaks.

        Playing with things and breaking things as you learn is a lot less of a hassle when you can simply roll back your system to where it was yesterday, instead of having to re-install it from scratch

        • sbird@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
          34·
          3 days ago

          wait should I use systemd-boot (default in EndeavourOS) or grub bootloader?

          edit: After a quick search, it looks like it doesn’t really matter. I will go with systemd-boot

          • Ada@lemmy.blahaj.zone
            7·
            3 days ago

            No no no. That won’t work with btrfs snapshots if you’ve had a kernel upgrade. Choose grub from those two

  • Nate@piefed.alphapuggle.devEnglish
    92·
    2 days ago

    I spent my weekend driving out to my grandparents place to fix her BTRFS partition on her laptop. This is after I had a complete partition failure on a brand new hard drive last spring, which has since been running just fine since with ext4. Make of that as you will.

    A beautiful picture I took in the process

    • floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      3·
      2 days ago

      Can’t read superblock doesn’t mean that it’s bad, the read could fail for other reasons. it’s a pretty generic error message that I see most times mount fails tbh

  • unexpectedprism@programming.dev
    2·
    2 days ago

    I have experienced both cases where btrfs mounted read only for no good reason and cases where ext4 did not detect my storage medium had corrupted my data. I have chosen btrfs for data integrity but both options have upsides.

    • sbird@sopuli.xyzOPEnglish
      41·
      3 days ago

      Noted. But then why does Fedora ship with btrfs then, given that they are catering to a mainstream audience?

      • themoken@startrek.website
        7·
        3 days ago

        Btrfs has a bunch of features and is one of the contenders for the “next” filesystem. Ext4 is utterly bulletproof though and has good enough perf so it’s still your best bet unless you specifically want to use the advanced btrfs features.

      • thingsiplay@lemmy.ml
        61·
        3 days ago

        Because Fedora likes to adapt the newest stuff very early. While it’s not like “very early” for BTRFS anymore, its still exceptional unusual to have it as the default in a mainstream distribution. And they want to benefit from the feature set of BTRFS, so it makes sense to use it as the default. Why shouldn’t the mainstream benefit from quick snapshots and backups? I don’t see the argument “are catering to mainstream audience” as to not use BTRFS?

  • thingsiplay@lemmy.ml
    5·
    3 days ago

    I would say, if you want benefit from the features of BTRFS, then go for it. But you have to read a bit what it can do, and use tools and set it up to get the most out of it I think. EXT4 on the other hand is proven and is a setup and forget experience. I chose EXT4 when installing EndeavourOS, because I read a few things about BTRFS that made me think twice and also I don’t need the features too. So, if you don’t know and have to ask the community, then the best would be to us EXT4, unless you know why you want to have BTRFS features.

  • Seefra 1@lemmy.zip
    1·
    2 days ago

    ext4 is faster, I always use it for /

    As for data I use btrfs because it has checksumming and it can detect corrupted files, while ext4 just lets you copy a corrupted file to your backup.

    I’ve had some issues with btrfs, in the past but was many years ago, probably not relevant anymore.

  • Solemarc@lemmy.world
    3·
    3 days ago

    I would recommend btrfs at this point. I use it for my OS harddrive and I would also use it for my second harddrive except I don’t want to format it, so it’s still running ext4.

    Theoretically btrfs runs slower then ext4 but you won’t see it outside of benchmarks. Btrfs can also do integrity checks and healing so your drive (might) last longer, ultimately, that one depends on what exactly is wrong with it.