BRTFS or EXT4

I don’t want to suggest in any direction either, I was just curious what happened (read only state, only one subvolume not mountable, no filesystem detected at all, …) since I didn’t experience such an issue myself yet.

I didn’t. Installed EOS on my new lappy and just did the standard install, which gave me EXT4. End of story for buttereffess. :woman_shrugging:

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Thanks all of you for your kind support and for your time. Really friendly community. Here I am growing.

I will stay on EXT4

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Welcome @kepler22b
My 2 cents,
I tried and installed several times.
BTRFS caused me a few issues. You can find out at Baloo is The Responsible of Unresponsivenes

Of course it is up to you, but I personally settled on Ext4.

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For anyone who is new, or just restarting their Linux journey, I would have to recommend ext4. It’s simple, it’s proven and it works. Save the others for later when you are comfortable in your environment. That is the time to experiment and change if you decide you want something different.

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@Pudge Hare and the tortoise eh? :wink:

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that’s the valid point, also BTRFS is already used a lot on a professional level like you can read here:
https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Production_Users

Facebook (testing in production as of 2014/04, deployed on millions of servers as of 2018/10)

The use-case where it is used is different in one thing, they do not have to care about hardware failure as this is automated and they use backup solutions that make hardware failure something to not have to think of …
But recovering a dying piece of hard drive is 1000 times better documented and proven for ext4.

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Professional level Production Users. I think that sums it up. I think that also shows that it is a viable, workable alternative which is good, but not for a lot of (perhaps newbie) Linux Distro desktop users. I think a lot of people jump into an Arch-based distro expecting the ultimate solution. What they need to realise is they need to learn the basics of Linux itself. Arch is not an answer, it is just an expression of Linux. Sorry, this applies to btrfs as well, not just Arch, got a little OT there!

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That is valid sentiment, but I don’t think it has to be that way. Setting up the filesystem at all is hard. No new Linux user is able to understand grub, fstab, crypttab etc. All that is usually done by an GUI installer and abstracted away for the casual user. Isn’t the whole point of EndeavourOS that people want to avoid these tedious tasks?

If btrfs becomes better supported in the the setup process there’s no reason that it has to be more complicated to run than ext4 - at least when not using any of the extended features that elevates btrfs beyond ext4.

Better supported is the thing. Within gparted or Calamares you are given the choice between gpt/mbr,legacy bios/uefi and then between ext4/btrfs and a whole lot of file systems. It must be confusing for someone who does not know what these things are. So: point them to a newbie distro or explain what the differences are before installing?

11 years ago when I first installed Mint I didn’t have a bloody clue about those things!

I’m running Btrfs. My first attempt was at following the @2000 wiki for Btrfs and Timeshift with Snapshots and also with some help. Worked great Btw. Now i am using Btrfs installed with the EndeavourOS ISO and snapper with a lot of help from @Dalto. Still only understand bits & pieces but enough to know how to install it and set it up and get it working. If i had to do it manually is a little more work and also not always 100% sure on things. Currently i probably would struggle just reverting to an older snapshot with snapper. But when that day comes. Well see. I haven’t had any issues so far and i have a lot of snapshots.

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What more support could be added? You literally just choose btrfs from a dropdown and it sets everything up for you.

That is part of the problem: people need to understand the file system. Anyone can install something but if they don’t understand what it is they have just installed then they are screwed. Example: I installed Gentoo about 10 years ago, I didn’t have a clue what was going on! :rofl: Well no that’s not true, I tried!

Not really. btrfs works mostly like a normal filesystem unless you want to take advantage of it’s more advanced features. You can go through the installer, choose btrfs and use the system without any special knowledge.

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OK, I take that on board. With one question: mostly?

There are some transparent features such as compression and copy-on-write. In most cases, you don’t really need to understand that.

Look at it this way, Synology, Fedora and all desktop variants of Suse ship btrfs as the default filesystem. I would be willing to bet that a significant number of their users don’t even know which filesystem they are using.

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BTRFS has some nifty features and such not in the usual crop of filesystems. Its got a lot of similarity to ZFS and to use it in a more advanced way requires a bit more knowledge. If youre a normal user its no different than EXT4 for the most part from your perspective.

I’m aware that some filesystems have other features which ext4 doesn’t but that does not explain anything. “I don’t really need to understand this”? In the words of Greta Thunberg: How dare you! :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

If people are going to learn a linux distro, and especially a rolling release based one then they either need some more guidance or perhaps try something a bit more simple like Mint or whatever. I don’t know the answer to this but what I do know that is my own life I’ve researched and sorted out my owm questions and issues. We cannot hold everyone’s hands forever. The future depends upon our ability to deal with it ourselves. Please excuse my rant but I just see too many people looking for an easy way out.

A lot most likely.

Welcome to The Matrix!