Btrfs should've been Wayland
Btrfs should've been Wayland
I think the problem with btrfs is that it entered the spotlight way to early. With Wayland there was time to work on a lot of the kinks before everyone started seriously switching.
On btrfs a bunch of people switched blindly and then lost data. This caused many to have a bad impression of btrfs. These days it is significantly better but because there was so much fear there is less attention paid to it and it is less widely used.
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Both Fedora and openSUSE default to Btrfs. That's all the praise it needs really.
With Bcachefs still being relatively immature and the situation surrounding (Open)ZFS unchanged, Btrfs is the only CoW-viable option we got. So people will definitely find it, if they need it. Which is where the actual issue is; why would someone for which ext4 has worked splendidly so far, even consider switching? It's the age-old discussion in which peeps simply like to stick to what already works.
Tbh, if only Debian would default to Btrfs, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
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You are welcome to start a movement to get Debian to switch. You will be swimming up stream but you are welcome to try. Debian has been the same for decades and people like that.
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You didn't get my point. Btrfs is one OG distro removed from being THE standard. It's doing a lot better than you're making it out to be.
It's not like Btrfs is dunking on all other file systems and Debian is being unreasonable by defaulting to ext4. Instead, Btrfs wins some of its battles and loses others. It's pretty competent overall, but ext4 (and other competing file systems) have their respective merits.
Thankfully, we got competing standards that are well-tested. We should celebrate this diversity instead of advocating for monocultures.
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It sounds like btrfs is solid most of the time and will explode for like 1 and a thousand cases.
A few years ago left my Fedora machine at home and left for a few days on a trip. When I got back the device was powered off and when I powered it on it said no boot device. When I booted off of a USB the drive showed as unknown with no formating to speak of.
I was able to recover it and the btrfs partition as apparently the GPT table had been overwritten. To this day I have no idea what went wrong. Btrfs in general is very solid in my experience and I use it for USB devices and my Fedora machines. I have never had a issue outside if that one time it died.
Btrfs is the filesystem that is cool but also potentially explosive. I think it has a huge amount of potential and I am very tempted to move my Proxmox machines over since it doesn't have the same limitations of ZFS
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@lancalot @possiblylinux127 I tried it once, it pissed itself and corrupted the entire file system to the point where I couldn't recover, went back to ext4. Had similar experience with xfs.
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what ZFS situation?
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I'll keep it brief. But it comes down to the fact that, out of the more popular distros, it's only officially supported on Ubuntu.
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https://openzfs.github.io/openzfs-docs/Getting Started/index.html
i've found to work without issue on Fedora, Arch and Ubuntu so maybe it's supported very well
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@lancalot @possiblylinux127 eh, also Garuda defaults to BTRFS, EOS does not default to BTRFS, but it has an option on their Calamares
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I wanted to stick to (what I'd refer to as) OG distros; so independent distros that have kept their relevance over a long period of time.
But you're correct, Garuda Linux and others default to Btrfs as well. At this point, I'd argue it's the most sensible option if snapshot functionality is desired from Snapper/Timeshift.
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@lancalot none of the "main" distros default to BTRFS, just "derivatives" default to BTRFS, Garuda is based on Arch, so it's normal that it's one of the rising new distros, Garuda rose because gaming on Linux received a huge boost from sources like Valve so I doubt that it (Garuda) will deviate from its path with time, plus, they provide multiple flavors for multiple purposes, gaming requires stability & sometimes a rollback mechanism, that's where BTRFS shine, not so much stability BTW
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none of the “main” distros default to BTRFS, just “derivatives” default to BTRFS
So you don't regard Fedora (or openSUSE) as "main" distro?
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@lancalot OpenSUSE is based on SUSE (created in 1994)
Fedora was developed as a continuation of RHEL
Maybe "main" is not well appropriate, I wanted to say "distros that have no precedence & not based on anything", for example, 0.12 was a "main" distro, MCC Interim Linux was a "derivative" distro-
I suppose we differ in our definitions. Which is absolutely fine, to be honest*.
For completeness' sake, IMO it's basically the intersection of Major Distributions and Independent Distributions. Which happens to consist of Arch, Debian, Fedora, Gentoo, openSUSE and Slackware.
Out of these, Arch and Gentoo don't have defaults, but their documentation uses ext4 most frequently for examples. For the remaining four, Fedora and openSUSE default to Btrfs. While Debian and Slackware default to ext4.
In all fairness, one might argue that Distrowatch's list of major distros is arbitrary. Therefore, we could refine what's found above by including actually data. For this, I'll use Boiling Steam's usage chart based on ProtonDB's data. This ain't perfect either, but it's the best I can do. Here, we notice how both Gentoo and Slackware are not represented. Furthermore, NixOS poses as a candidate instead. For which, we find that (if anything) ext4 is the default. Regardless, it doesn't actually impact the earlier outcome:
- Arch (and Gentoo) don't have defaults
- Debian(, Slackware and NixOS) default to ext4
- Fedora and openSUSE default to Btrfs
Anyhow, what are the main distros according to you? Please offer an exhaustive list, please. Thanks in advance!
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@lancalot the "main" that are alive today are (like on this graph) https://rreinold.github.io/explore-linux/ :Debian, Slackware, RHEL, Gentoo, Arch & android
These are only the alive ones, however, I couldn't find any info about Nix OS so it remains on the maybe category cause I tried it and could not find any hint to the past-
I suppose that's a fair assessment. Thanks for the clarification!
However, I do give precedence over their current situations.
- So, if e.g. Arch would continue to exist, but ultimately became the downstream/derivative of another distro, then I would stop regarding it as 'main'. Which one may argue happened between RHEL and Fedora.
- Similarly, if a derivative starts building their own repos and becomes entirely independent from the distro they were originally derived from, then I'd stop regarding them as a derivative. Instead I'd acknowledge them as an independent distro. Like how openSUSE ultimately is derived from Slackware, but they're hardly comparable today.
Regarding NixOS, it and other independent distros are absent in the link you provided. NixOS is literally its own thing and also old; older than Ubuntu and Android for example. So, if anything, it did deserve a mention. Though, I suppose the maker of that website didn't think it was relevant enough to be included over three years ago. NixOS' popularity has thankfully exploded in the mean time, though.
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@lancalot I understand the list I provided is not necessarily complete, because Void & Solus are also independent, however, for them to be "main", they should have "derivatives", I don't claim that I have a big Linux experience, but I tried & documented myself about the distros on the list, & can confirm that they are "main", I also tried Nix OS, the use of 1 config file is refreshing, however that ease comes at the cost of some flexibility, installing Steam there is too complicated for me
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however, for them to be “main”, they should have “derivatives”,
Got you. Aight. I suppose that does disqualify NixOS. Though, to be fair, Guix System is heavily inspired from NixOS.
I also tried Nix OS, the use of 1 config file is refreshing, however that ease comes at the cost of some flexibility, installing Steam there is too complicated for me
Hehe 😜. Yeah, the paradigm shift associated with NixOS isn't one that's overcome in one sitting. But it's cool to hear that you've tested it for yourself.
Anyhow, this was a cool interaction. Thank you for offering your insights! Wish you, my akhi in (at least) humanity, a lovely day!
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