Great take. But you know the real sneaky one that trips you up? File system.
I wouldn’t call myself a beginner, but every time I install a Linux system seriously I see those filesystem choices and have to dig through volumes of turbo-nerd debates on super fine intricacies between them, usually debating their merits in super high-risk critical contexts.
I still don’t come away with knowing which one will be best for me long-term in a practical sense.
As well as tons of “It ruined my whole system” or “Wrote my SSD to death” FUD that is usually outdated but nevertheless persists.
Honestly nowadays I just happily throw BTRFS on there because it’s included on the install and allows snapshots and rollbacks. EZPZ.
For everything else, EXT4, and for OS-shared storage, NTFS.
But it took AGES to arrive to this conclusion. Beginners will have their heads spun at this choice, guaranteed. It’s frustrating.
If I read lsblk correctly, I am using ext4 for my whole drive. I have used linux for some years now, but I never bothered to learn more than “next next next done” when installing my OS.
Does BTRFS popOS allow BTRFS? Should I bother for a daily driver?
In practice BTRFS is a bit faster and on a Distro like Fedora or Opensuse they already integrate it to do system backups while running (copy on write).
In practice it just works and you dont use all the fancy possibilities, because a majority of the Linux world still sticks with ext4 for whatever reason, so Filemanagers and backup tools wouldnt reach everyone.
Its a perfect example of Linux slowing down itself by desperately refusing to change
Xorg
old Desktops
old software, system packages, damn appimages
no automatic updates
ext4 instead of something modern
Ext4 is from 2008. BTRFS is even older from 2007, but was only declared stable in 2013. More innovation, more testing time, more “dont use it yet, it is unstable”. Ext4 probably never was as they didnt try that much.
Ext4 is the safe bet for a beginner. The real question is with or without LVM. Generally I would say with but that abstraction layer between the filesystem and disk can really be confusing if you’ve never dealt with it before. A total beginner should probably go ext4 without LVM and then play around in a VM with the various options to become informed enough to do something less vanilla.
Can you explain LVM in practice to me? I used ext4 and now Fedora Kinoite with BTRFS, the filsystem never makes any problems and some fancy features just work.
In practice, you would split a disk up to keep /home separate from/ and probably other parts of the filesystem too like /var/log… this has long been an accepted practice to keep a full disk from bringing something production offline completely and/or complicating the recovery process. Now, you could use partitions but once those are set, it’s hard to rearrange them without dumping all the data and restoring it under the new tables. LVM stands for Logical Volume Manager and puts an abstraction layer between the filesystems and the partitions (or whole disk if you are into that). This means you can add Disks arbitrarily in the future and add parts of those disks to the filesystems as required. This can really minimize or even eliminate downtime when you have a filesystem getting filled up and there’s nothing you can easily remove (like a database).
It’s good to know but with the proliferation of cloud and virtual disks it’s just easier on those systems to leave off LVM and just keep the filesystems on their own virtual disks and grow the disk as required. It is invaluable when running important production systems on bare metal servers even today.
Yes, I listened to a podcast about that recently. Linux was far with XFS or something, but then Apple came, improved their HFS and actually made tools for it and it got better.
BTRFS is just as established as etx4, just not as damn old. It also just works, and it has advanced features that are crucial for backups. But I have no idea how to use btrbk and there is no GUI so nobody uses that.
But as a filesystem that just works like ext4, plus the automatically configured snapshots in both regular and atomic Fedora systems and OpenSuse, BTRFS is awesome.
Only outdated Distros that fear change stick with ext4, at least thats my opinion.
Great take. But you know the real sneaky one that trips you up? File system.
I wouldn’t call myself a beginner, but every time I install a Linux system seriously I see those filesystem choices and have to dig through volumes of turbo-nerd debates on super fine intricacies between them, usually debating their merits in super high-risk critical contexts.
I still don’t come away with knowing which one will be best for me long-term in a practical sense.
As well as tons of “It ruined my whole system” or “Wrote my SSD to death” FUD that is usually outdated but nevertheless persists.
Honestly nowadays I just happily throw BTRFS on there because it’s included on the install and allows snapshots and rollbacks. EZPZ.
For everything else, EXT4, and for OS-shared storage, NTFS.
But it took AGES to arrive to this conclusion. Beginners will have their heads spun at this choice, guaranteed. It’s frustrating.
If I read
lsblkcorrectly, I am usingext4for my whole drive. I have used linux for some years now, but I never bothered to learn more than “next next next done” when installing my OS.Does BTRFS popOS allow BTRFS? Should I bother for a daily driver?
In practice BTRFS is a bit faster and on a Distro like Fedora or Opensuse they already integrate it to do system backups while running (copy on write).
In practice it just works and you dont use all the fancy possibilities, because a majority of the Linux world still sticks with ext4 for whatever reason, so Filemanagers and backup tools wouldnt reach everyone.
Its a perfect example of Linux slowing down itself by desperately refusing to change
Ext4 is from 2008. BTRFS is even older from 2007, but was only declared stable in 2013. More innovation, more testing time, more “dont use it yet, it is unstable”. Ext4 probably never was as they didnt try that much.
Ext4 is the safe bet for a beginner. The real question is with or without LVM. Generally I would say with but that abstraction layer between the filesystem and disk can really be confusing if you’ve never dealt with it before. A total beginner should probably go ext4 without LVM and then play around in a VM with the various options to become informed enough to do something less vanilla.
Can you explain LVM in practice to me? I used ext4 and now Fedora Kinoite with BTRFS, the filsystem never makes any problems and some fancy features just work.
In practice, you would split a disk up to keep /home separate from/ and probably other parts of the filesystem too like /var/log… this has long been an accepted practice to keep a full disk from bringing something production offline completely and/or complicating the recovery process. Now, you could use partitions but once those are set, it’s hard to rearrange them without dumping all the data and restoring it under the new tables. LVM stands for Logical Volume Manager and puts an abstraction layer between the filesystems and the partitions (or whole disk if you are into that). This means you can add Disks arbitrarily in the future and add parts of those disks to the filesystems as required. This can really minimize or even eliminate downtime when you have a filesystem getting filled up and there’s nothing you can easily remove (like a database).
It’s good to know but with the proliferation of cloud and virtual disks it’s just easier on those systems to leave off LVM and just keep the filesystems on their own virtual disks and grow the disk as required. It is invaluable when running important production systems on bare metal servers even today.
Hope this helps.
Thanks! So BTRFS does something similar with volumes, but baked in.
Yes, I listened to a podcast about that recently. Linux was far with XFS or something, but then Apple came, improved their HFS and actually made tools for it and it got better.
BTRFS is just as established as etx4, just not as damn old. It also just works, and it has advanced features that are crucial for backups. But I have no idea how to use btrbk and there is no GUI so nobody uses that.
But as a filesystem that just works like ext4, plus the automatically configured snapshots in both regular and atomic Fedora systems and OpenSuse, BTRFS is awesome.
Only outdated Distros that fear change stick with ext4, at least thats my opinion.