This is off topic I guess. Not sure if there is any security or privacy benefit from using over the other. What file system are you running in your setup? Feel welcome to comment why. Is there maybe better compatibility with new laptop hardwares using ext4?
There is absolutely no reason to use ext4 instead of btrfs on a modern system.
btrfs for single drives or tiny arrays, zfs for anything bigger or needing more resiliency
it is 2024, compression and checksumming and snapshots are glorious, don’t suffer with ext4/xfs/etc.
This is pretty much my go-to logic.
Zfs with encryption.
@user12
Fedora has defaulted to btrfs for three years now.
@securitybrahh
you might consider layering it on OPAL or dm-crypt as it doesn’t encrypt all metadata
it also has some bugs: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/issues/12594#issuecomment-929941596
I strongly prefer BTRFS and/or ZFS. But I’m not sure I would make a general unqualified recommendation for these filesystems over others for all users.
For less experienced, or less ‘hands-on’ users. I think that your best bet is to stick with the default for your distro (or a relatively popular well documented, non-default option) unless you have specific wants/needs.
Fedora & OpenSUSE already use BTRFS by default (this is one of the primary things that attracted me to these distros in the first place), Ubuntu has ZFS support (not as a default, but as a supported option, including encryption). Arch doesn’t have a default, but BTRFS is fairly popular.
Note that this poll will be skewed. Ext4 is used by way more people but pretty much nobody is passionate about it, while those of us who use BTRFS or ZFS have in many cases gone out of our way to do so, have a stronger preference and will be much more likely to answer a poll. (this is a widespread measurement problem in the Linux space (people using niche software tend to have stronger opinion about it, and are over represented in voluntary polls).
Fedora 40 installation video:
check out the 3:12. As default Fedora offers ext4.
2 weeks ago I also installed Fedora on my machine. It offers me ext4 as default. I go with it.
Ubuntu installer does that?
When I (briefly) read up on this, my impression was that the type of metadata not encrypted is probably not a privacy concern for most people. But I have only limited knowledge on the subject so there may be scenarios I’m not seeing or not properly understanding.
Are there specific categories of metadata that aren’t protected which you’d consider sensitive? or specific contexts in which you think it poses a greater risk?
The OpenZFS wiki mentions:
ZFS will encrypt file and volume data, file attributes, ACLs, permission bits, directory listings, FUID mappings, and userused/groupused data. ZFS will not encrypt metadata related to the pool structure, including dataset and snapshot names, dataset hierarchy, properties, file size, file holes, and deduplication tables (though the deduplicated data itself is encrypted).
This blog post has a table of what is and is not encrypted
This reddit thread has some discussion
This Ars article has a practical example
@xe3
you summed it up well, for most people it probably isn’t an issue, just should be aware of
Which is a interesting choice, considering Red Hat has completely abandoned BTRFS in RHEL. It’s not even usable in RHEL anymore and you have to use Orecle Linux, if you want RHEL-like Linux with BTRFS.
@sha123
they’re too busy pushing vdo and stratis to care about us plebs
So far, it isn’t looking like one side complete dominates the other. I think some may vote for the current underdog (ext4) but won’t going to stress joining the discussion.
If you need features of BTRFS and can maintain it, go for it. However, if you aren’t, might as well use ext4. Ensure you also know how to chroot in case of one of those situations.
I’ve used ext3/ext4 for decades and never had serious problems with them. If I was using an unstable Linux distro and had extra disk space, I might consider BTRFS. Otherwise, ext4 suits me.
I guess one other factor could be the performance. Not sure if someone touched it on the comments before and perhaps maybe things improved but some benchmarks indicates some advantages of using ext4 over btrfs.
This can be observed watching DJ Ware comparing benchmarks of Fedora 39 and Ubuntu 23.10 in here conclusions around 8:10.
Just food for thoughts.
Not sure that’s t rue because I installed fedora 40 and it was btrfs
They default with xfs though because you’re supposed to use stratis. Most likely because raid configurations are more common.
bcachefs will likely be the next filesystem to look out for
I think the FS per se is less important these days.
What is more important is the 3-2-1 backup rule.
With that said, IIRC I have had better success in recovering files from photorec with ext4 than BTRFS. So my vote would be on ext4. Currently the fs of my system uses the default for Fedora, so its BTRFS.
I think still quite relevant.
Btrfs is really good providing compression, checksumming and snapshot features BUT at a cost of performance since it floods the kernel with sysreqs to create memory blocks for each write. This can be a tradeoff that gamers for example can’t accept specially if you are a professional in this area. One can have better gaming performance using ext4 because of this.
I think both FS has their advantages and use for the audiences.
proof or placebo