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Examining btrfs, Linux’s perpetually half-finished filesystem

I've been pleasantly surprised by Btrfs, even on an old mechanical drive.

The way people kick off on Reddit about it running on spinning rust, you would think it would be unusable.
 
My assumption is that for casual media consumption, browsing and gaming the difference is not going to be as stark as to a power-user and therefore not matter too much. I know my current normal Fedora 44 KDE install is btrfs and I don't see a huge difference between it and ext4 (although still waiting for my T710 to come out of RMA so I will have an opportunity to revisit if I wanted to.

I do have ext4 running on my storage drives in the main PC and on my server storage drive (no RAID).
 
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and btrfs is a perfect combination. Having snapshots available makes it almost impossible to break your install no matter what you do.
 
Cromulent said:
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed and btrfs is a perfect combination. Having snapshots available makes it almost impossible to break your install no matter what you do.
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That's a good point I forgot. With CachyOS and Limine you get snapshots by default and can restore as needed. Does give you more fallback options.
 
I've pretty much given up on the idea of ZFS and will stick with Btrfs!

Staying with things inside the kernel is so much easier, i just need to make changes to ditch Nvidia and Realtek DKMS files.
 
Ice Tea said:
I've pretty much given up on the idea of ZFS and will stick with Btrfs!

Staying with things inside the kernel is so much easier, i just need to make changes to ditch Nvidia and Realtek DKMS files.
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What nvidia dkms drivers are you using? How come you have to use a dkms package?
 
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Makhaira said:
Btrfs has saved me more than once as I've been learning Cachyos, an OS failing to boot after updates is nothing more than a shoulder shrug now.
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To echo this, I had an issue today on one of my CachyOS installs (hanging on entering desktop), hard reboot, roll back to yesterday afternoon's snapshot, wait a few hours (it was a bug in dccutil), redo the update and fixed.
 
Sin_Chase said:
What nvidia dkms drivers are you using? How come you have to use a dkms package?
Click to expand...

I stopped using the Nvidia run files years ago with Manjaro black screening every time there was a Kernel update.

I just take what ever APT or Ubuntu software offers and it builds the .ko file locally via dkms.
 
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People are still arguing this? :cry: It was a 'thing' ~15 years ago, and back then you really could lose your stuff if you sneezed the wrong way or Btrfs got out of bed the wrong side today. A cloud was something that rained, and 3-2-what?... It's been fairly mainstream for years now. OpenSUSE (or however they're capitalising it these days) and Fedora run it out of the box, — and Synology have run their RAID on it for years. Rock solid. Someone mentioned Btrfs + timeshift. That was revolutionary 15 years ago, and made Windows System Restore look archaic.
 
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