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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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What file systems are you using on your devices and why? (en.wikipedia.org)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

215 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I want to learn more about file systems from the practical point of view so I know what to expect, how to approach them and what experience positive or negative you had / have.

I found this wikipedia's comparison but I want your hands-on views.

For now my mental list is

NTFS - for some reason TVs on USB love these and also Windows + Linux can read and write this
Ext4 - solid fs with journaling but Linux specific
Btrfs - some modern fs with snapshot capability, Linux specific
xfs - servers really like these as they are performant, Linux specific
FAT32 - limited but recognizable everywhere
exFAT - like FAT32 but less recognizable and less limited

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 3 months ago (3 children)

ZFS where possible for maximum reliability

It also has self healing, no "partitions", high performance, compression, smart drive redundancy without RAID holes, encryption, deduplication and an extremery intelligent cache called ARC

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 months ago

ZFS is completely ridiculous. It's like someone actually sat down to design an intelligent filesystem instead of making a slightly improved version of what's already out there.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

Holy xfs is probably not close to that?

[–] non_burglar 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

XFS is simply a journalling filesystem.

ZFS is a COW filesystem and volume manager with compression, block management, and an adaptive read cache.

Kind of an apples-to-oranges comparison.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 months ago

Technically XFS is also a CoW filesystem, but it doesn't have the vast array of features that ZFS does like volume management, snapshots, send/recv etc. It does have reflink support which I guess is a kind of snapshot for a file.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Well, encryption is very much not a strong point of zfs. I agree on all other points tho.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Actually native encryption has been a feature of ZFS for a few years now. It's nice not having to have an extra LUKS layer.