BTRFS on Linux (including the SD card in my Steam Deck, dunno what the root storage on that uses). NTFS on Windows (BTRFS driver for Windows isn’t quite as stable as I’d like it to be). ZFS on a NAS because that’s how it came set up and so far the zRAID hasn’t failed me yet. FAT32 for UEFI boot partitions and recovery USB drives.
XFS at work because apparently ext4 isn’t “mature enough”. Not by choice.
No idea what Android uses, probably ext4 with some software on top?
I've got Btrfs on my desktop for the OS drive cuz that was what Fedora recommended when I was installing it. It took a bit of effort to get snapshots working properly, but other than that, I've had no issues with it at all over the past year. I've got an exFAT drive and an NTFS drive in there that are kind of leftovers from using Windows. I've been thinking about reformatting the exFAT drive to ext4 or something, since all it really does is store games, and having the ability to symlink to it would be nice.
I've got a TrueNAS machine as well and that uses ZFS for pretty much everything.
I think btrfs was the default the last time I installed Bazzite, but I don’t really know anything about it so I switched it to ext4. I understand the snapshot ability is nice with rolling release distros, though.
It’d been ages since I’d used FAT32 for anything until I made a Debian live USB when I was setting up my pi-hole on an old Core2Duo recently. It would only boot on FAT32 for reasons I probably once knew. 😆
NTFS was an improvement over the FATs what with the journaling, security, file streams, etc. I use it wherever I still use Windows (work).
Most of my general purpose USB flash drives use exFAT. I like not having to worry about eject/unmount.
NTFS feels rock solid if you use only Windows and extremely janky if you dual-boot. Linux currently can’t really fix NTFS volumes and thus won’t mount them if they’re inconsistent.
As it happens, they’re inconsistent all the time. I’ve had an NTFS volume become dirty after booting into Windows and then shutting down. Not a problem for Windows but Linux wouldn’t touch the volume until I’d booted into Windows at least once.
I finally decided to use a storage upgrade to move most drives to Btrfs save for the Windows system volume and a shared data partition that’s now on ExFAT because it’s good enough for it.
By default, windows does “Fast Boot” which doesn’t make booting any faster, but does have the benefit of leaving the volume in a mounted state when you shut it down.
Oh, right. Fast Boot. I forgot about that bundle of joy.
But that’s wasn’t the only instance of an NTFS volume suddenly being broken. Another favorite was when I shrunk a volume on one disk from Linux (and then remembered that Windows correspond done it better) and rebooted to have it fixed and Windows proceeded to repair one on a different disk.
I mainly started using exFAT on flash drives (even on new ones) since it is interoperable between Windows, Linux, and Intel Mac. To be clear, I never don’t unmount the drive properly under normal conditions, but I remember reading around the time it was introduced that the Windows implementation guaranteed the buffers were flushed after every write (meaning no unwritten data remains when the activity indicator on the drive stops blinking) but now I can’t find any evidence that was ever the case. Wouldn’t be the first time I got bad info from the Internet. 🤷♂️
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
I respect your reliable and proven comment. I really love the features of BTRFS and that’s why I use it, but I also really care about my data. I have secondary installations that use EXT4 and work very well.
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.
I wish I’d actually chosen a file system instead of just letting window’s at the time default to NTFS for external drives.
Moving from Windows to Debian; NTFS has been nothing but a headache. I’ve actually had to setup a windows machine to serve that drive pool via SAMBA as Linux just won’t play nicely with it.
Every photocopy machine I’ve come across that accept USB sticks do not support exFAT, so what I would do with my USB stick is to split it into two partitions, one FAT32 and the rest exFAT.
Most of my drives are EXT4, but I started using BTRFS a couple years ago and will be using it on all new installs from now on. I really like being able to make snapshots and compression reduces the install size quite a bit.
Ext4 for system disks because it’s default in OS installers and it works well. I typically use it on top of LVMRAID (LVM-managed mdraid) for redundancy and expansion flexibility.
ZFS for storage because it’s got data integrity verification, trivial setup, flexible redundancy topologies, free snapshots, blazing fast replication, easy expansion, incredible flexibility in separating data and performance tuning within the same filesystem. I’d be looking into setting up ZFS on root for my next machine. Among other things that would enable trivial and blazing fast backup of the system while it’s running - as simple as syncoid -r rpool backup-server:machine4-rpool.
I’d be looking into setting up ZFS on root for my next machine
I too was on the path of adventure once but then the kernel module hasn’t been built after the upgrade. Also btrfs offers some nice features for root especially that zfs doesn’t have.
You can boot straight into snapshot, may be useful if an update went wrong or you don’t like new kde.
You can change drives and raid configuration online. For example I bought a laptop that had windows preinstalled, so I used the second half of the disk space for linux, then I figured I don’t need windows so I formatted windows partition to btrfs, added it as a new device, moved all the data there, deleted the old linux partition and extended the new one to the whole drive, all that easy and without reboot.
Oh nice. I think that all of those are possible with ZFS too. Although I’m pretty sure that the snapshot-boot is done outside of ZFS itself. As in, there’s something else that takes the snapshots and makes them available to the bootloader. I think zsys used to do that in the experimental ZFS-on-root support that shipped in Ubuntu 20.04. I recall having a snapshot appear before every update and those snapshots were selectable from GRUB.
Are you sure this is the only good FS? I know it’s solid and stable and used for many years as default Linux’s FS but I disagree that’s the only good one.
en.wikipedia.org
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