As the title suggests, for new installations, should BTRFS, or F2FS be used?
Both have their advantages, like for example, BTRFS snapshots, and F2FS flash longevity.
I’ve seen in this post, that not a lot of people use F2FS… granted, that post is a bit old, but maybe you could suggest it in the installer?
And I know, EOS is more focused for advanced users that know how partitions work, but I was still curious if it could be mainstream to have F2FS on the installer, and if possible, to detect if the installation is going to be made on a flash based storage device.
I use f2fs for one of my EndeavourOS installations (Inspiron 7415 2-in-1 on a Samsung PM9A1 SSD), and I have to say it runs fantastic. SEEMS ever so tiny bit faster than EXT4 to me on the same hardware. That may be just my own bias for wanting it to be faster. I personally have absolutely no interest in anything that BTRFS offers, so while I have a VM of OpenSUSE using it, I never use it on bare metal because I just haven’t found it to offer me any good reason to move over to it from EXT4 (snapshots are, for me, a negative of BTRFS since they take up room without offering me anything I want/need).
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Agree completely. I have tried out f2fs, and couldn’t detect anything different from an ext4 install, except the ‘possible’ speedup, and the potential for greater ‘wearability’. In my case I decided that ext4 had a nexistential advantage in recovery procedures IF I mess up - so I went with that
I’ve gone with hearsay and ‘lack of feature need’ on btrfs as well, although I have to admit to having no troubles with it on my Garuda build… although there I do not spend a lot of time or disk usage to really know…
Is it just me, or am I alone in wanting facts or solid anecdotals to back up an opinion?
f2fs is not an option on EOS in the installer menu unless you manually edit before running the install. I myself am using btrfs with btrfs-assistant and snapper-support as well as btrfsmaintenance on grub. I don’t use systemd-boot which is the default now on EOS because i want to have the ability to boot on snapshots and restore. I don’t know everything there is to know about btrfs but i really like the setup and can’t see myself ever changing. It just doesn’t fail me. Although there can be issues with grub it is very easy to arch-chroot and reinstall grub and run the update grub command. I myself have added a hook to have grub reinstall and update when new kernels are installed. I’m quite satisfied with the way it works. Btrfs as well as f2fs have had some performance optimizations added to the kernels and some still upcoming.
I can’t tell you what’s best to use but I can say that btrfs works flawlessly for me.
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For a few years now I have been setting up multiboot installations in subvolumes (i.e. a single Btrfs partition) and it’s just great. You never need to worry about how large or small to make a partition with this kind of setup, because subvolumes just dynamically grow to whatever size they need to be.
It’s also very convenient for ISO testing because you can install right on to the existing Btrfs partition, test the new installation out for an hour or two, then delete the subvolumes you created when you are done and it’s as if the new installation was never there. The existing installations on there are untouched the whole time.
I have also been sending Btrfs snapshots to a backup server for a while now with btrbk
, which has been working out great. Having snapshots on the disk is very handy of course, but btrbk
is a nice easy way to turn those snapshots into an actual backup routine.
I think the main point to consider when deciding whether or not to use Btrfs is: do you want to use the extra features it has? That is essentially the whole point of Btrfs. If you aren’t interested in the extra features, I would just pick something else like others have mentioned.
I don’t necessarily use it for the extra features as i am probably unaware of all of them. I just use it because i like the ability to save snapshots and go back. It’s great and never fails. People say it can get corrupted. I’ve never seen that.
That is literally one of the extra features.
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Yes but there are others I’m probably totally unaware of maybe. I started using it when EOS added the file system to calamares and learned what i needed to in order to install it and use it. I had lots of help in the beginning to get to know and understand btrfs and btrfs-assistant and snapper-support and btrfsmaintenance using grub. I’ll never go back to using ext4 in the near future same as I’ll not use X11 because Wayland has gotten to a point where i finally could use it without any issues both on amdgpu and nvidia.
Edit: I also have tried f2fs on previous ISO’s