You know, ZFS, ButterFS (btrfs…its actually “better” right?), and I’m sure more.

I think I have ext4 on my home computer I installed ubuntu on 5 years ago. How does the choice of file system play a role? Is that old hat now? Surely something like ext4 has its place.

I see a lot of talk around filesystems but Ive never found a great resource that distiguishes them at a level that assumes I dont know much. Can anyone give some insight on how file systems work and why these new filesystems, that appear to be highlights and selling points in most distros, are better than older ones?

Edit: and since we are talking about filesystems, it might be nice to describe or mention how concepts like RAID or LUKS are related.

  • Lupec@lemm.ee
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    7 months ago

    Pretty much, yeah. At some point I remember the recommendation being having a separate /boot as well due to incompatibilities with GRUB’s save default option iirc, not sure that’s a thing anymore.

    Anyway, you usually set that up during the install process, although I’m not sure graphical installers let you handcraft btrfs subvolume mount points or even select them as such these days. Last I checked at least they either just used a default layout (@ and @home with Ubuntu, for instance) or treated it as a single volume with no further options.